Misunderstandings in your relationship because of autism

I would love to know if you have problems or misunderstandings in your relationships that you think they correlate with autism.

I am officially diagnosed with ADHD and am currently in the process of an autism diagnosis. Autism was not something I thought about until many of the issues I have experienced with my partner. I want to list some issues I have had and know if they resonate with you 🥺

1. Being complacent. I've read that this is a problem for many neurodivergent people because of masking... it became a big and systematic thing for me. I realized that I go through life feeling like I have to know what other people expect to know the “right” way to respond. So dealing with this has been hard.

2. Not reacting the way she wanted, or having an ambiguous reaction with jokes about “when we get married”, and “when we live together”, and other stuff.

The reality is that our relationship is very cheesy and I dream of sharing life with someone and having a home with someone (although I've never had this fantasy of "a wedding").

Thinking about it, I feel that there are many jokes and comments that I sense like “a test” and that makes me nervous, so my reaction is “not to show a reaction” and that detonated my partner. I heard an autistic girl talking about masking and reacting like a “blank board” and suddenly it made sense to me.

I respond better to these jokes now, but I wonder if it's because we've already talked about these issues seriously and know how we feel about them, so they no longer feel like tests.

3. My partner has told me that eye contact is important for her to feel heard and sometimes I fail doing it. I worry that she feels like I don't take it seriously, but when this happens, is weird for me, too, and the mental reminder of "Sure, I must make eye contact, I'll take it into account" is not enough.

Despite knowing is important and WANTING to sometimes I neglect it, I think it helps me concentrate on what she is saying, or I inadvertently neglected it because I was too focused on exploring other ways to get closer, like narrowing our space and making physical contact too, cause I love when she does this. Or maybe I'm dealing with noises and new places.

I could go on with more things that have made me think a lot, like feeling like it takes me longer to process what I feel and express it, or when I give very literal answers to Yes/No questions and she feels I'm being lazy answering and I'm not interested.

I would love to know your experience and know if you have any advice on how to handle them better or how to explore this with my partner without sounding like making excuses :( thanks a lot for reading!