24/09/2025
My friend once told me she'd married a man who needed step-by-step instructions to understand why she was upset when he reorganized her spice rack alphabetically without asking. I laughed, thinking she was exaggerating. Then I listened to David Finch's audiobook and realized she wasn't describing a quirky husband—she was describing someone with Asperger syndrome trying to decode the impossibly complex manual of marriage without anyone telling him there WAS a manual.
Finch discovered he had Asperger's five years into his marriage to Kristen, after spending those years wondering why he kept failing tests he didn't know he was taking. Why did his wife seem upset when he'd efficiently solved her problems instead of just listening? Why did romantic gestures feel like advanced calculus? Why did he keep stepping on emotional landmines he couldn't see?
So he did what any logical person would do: he started keeping a journal of "best practices" for being married. The result is the most endearing homework assignment ever undertaken, narrated by Finch himself with the earnestness of someone who genuinely believes that love is learnable if you just pay close enough attention.
1. Marriage Is a Foreign Language
Finch reveals that for someone with Asperger's, marriage isn't just about learning your partner's preferences—it's about learning an entirely different language of communication. When Kristen says she's "fine," she doesn't mean fine. When she mentions the dishwasher is full, she's not providing informational updates about kitchen appliances. Finch's literal brain has to learn these translations like a tourist with a phrasebook, turning every interaction into a careful exercise in interpretation.
2. Love Requires Conscious Practice
This insightful, touching and amusing book is a chronicle of Finch's dedicated attempts to be a better husband and father, keeping a journal of "best practices" to guide him. He writes himself notes like "Do not reorganize Kristen's things" and "When she's upset, hug first, solutions later." What makes this profound rather than pathetic is watching someone approach love with the same methodical attention he'd give to learning piano—because for him, emotional intelligence isn't intuitive, it's acquired.
3. Everyone's Marriage Could Use a Manual
The beauty of Finch's approach is that his "disability" becomes a superpower—by treating marriage as a skill to be studied rather than something that should just happen naturally, he becomes more intentional about love than most neurotypical people ever are. His best practices aren't just for people with Asperger's; they're for anyone who's ever wondered why their partner seems to speak in code or why good intentions keep producing hurt feelings.
4. Vulnerability Is the Ultimate Best Practice
Finch's willingness to share his failures—the fights he started by trying to "fix" Kristen's bad days, the social cues he missed, the times his logic crashed headfirst into her emotions—makes this memoir both hilarious and deeply moving. He shows us that admitting you don't understand something is the first step toward actually understanding it, and that sometimes the most loving thing you can do is ask for instructions.
5. Different Brains, Same Heart
What starts as one man's quest to decode his wife becomes a beautiful meditation on how all of us are just trying to love each other across the gap between different ways of seeing the world. Finch's Asperger's makes that gap more obvious, but it doesn't make it unique. Every marriage is two people learning to speak each other's language, and sometimes the people who have to work hardest at it end up doing it best.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/46yllrK
You can find and listen to the audiobook narration using the link above.
