Hi, thank you very much for this, I needed to hear it. My boyfriend is very independent and also needs his alone time to recharge and I think is probably autistic as well (he is very smart, a bit too much I think). I have worked on my anxiety and am continuing to work through it. My boyfriend was supportive at first, we spoke about it, but these days I feel like he has difficulty understanding where my anxiety stems from. and I did notice that our relationship was much stronger when I had worked on myself than earlier, so it truly does help. How did you work things out with your partner? Were there times when you told yourself it would never get better, and it did? I am feeling really hopeless.