Recently, my husband started a newsletter on his ADHD. There isn’t a lot about this stuff out there, so I am incredibly proud of what he is doing, mostly for himself, but that could benefit others too.
I don’t have ADHD, but I’ve learnt a great deal about living in close proximity.
When it comes to ADHD in relationships, there is some western literature on validating one’s experiences but it lacks perspective and cultural nuances. It’s one dimensional, hard to relate to and there is no room for the non-ADHD partner.
It feels patronising and reduces the spouse to an “ADHD partner”, as if there is little else to their identity. Also, you seldom see accounts of high functioning individuals/ couples because they’ve a “reputation” to protect.
So, sometimes, I wonder if I should write that desi account of such experiences?
My heart is a mental hospital
… that’s what I am going to call it, I jokingly told my husband.
But it wasn’t always easy to joke around like this.
The first few years of our marriage were incredibly hard dealing with my husbands’ depression and ADHD, and my lack of maturity to handle it all.
People would either say “oh well, everyone has some or the other problem in their marriage, you are not alone, deal with it” or “oh this sounds crazy, why are you still with him? You should leave.”
There was nobody to talk to.
Psychiatrists and therapists, including my own, didn’t help. This was 2010-11, I couldn’t furiously google for answers either. I was really scared. And now, I know that he was very scared too. There were several moments that made me want to quit.
The only people who stood by us, scared as hell too, but patient, were my parents.
Although I don’t entirely understand how I endured some of those moments early on and decided to stay, but I am bloody glad I did.
I now understand that marriage is a process, a continuous collaboration in progress and an opportunity to learn so much about yourself and life in general.
We are still the same people. We still have our episodes of madness (quite literally!). However, what’s evolved over the years is our ability to moderate our responses to each others’ idiosyncracies.
So in essence, I think what kept us going is our curiosity about how this journey will transpire, and a willingness to learn and evolve with it. Or at least that’s what I can say with the benefit of hindsight, that too over 13 years of that.
Singular Experiences
When you understand what ADHD is or how it affects someone, it's easier to make sense of their behaviour, even if you don’t do any better dealing with it. But in the absence of a diagnosis even, you don’t know what you’re dealing with or why.
As a relationship coach, when I sense an underlying condition with a client, I ask them if their therapist has diagnosed anything. But sometimes, people get offended. They worry that I might reduce their identity to a standard set of symptoms from DSM-5 and not try to understand them as an individual.
I don’t blame them.
We all have one uncle or aunt in the family who was never diagnosed, was either single all their life, or was left by their partner or had a terrible marriage, and their story becomes a reference for how our lives could enfold.
But that is very far from the truth.
Obviously I have only been able to truly appreciate this after seeing multiple clients with ASD or bi-polar, or their partners, and heard their stories, for instance.
While the diagnosis is not so much to label or reduce someone’s identity to something narrow and specific, it provides an adjusted frame of reference for those around you, in terms of what they can and cannot expect from you before beginning to work with you and learn more.
Successful marriages
ADHD or not, every person is different.
Every relationship is different.
A single relationship between two individuals can change drastically with time and circumstance.
On a related but unrelated note, I’ve been attending lots of conferences recently on the future of work and listening to people speculate on what it will take to be successful in a fast evolving world.
The one thing that people across generations from the industry seem to be saying is this - there is no single skill that is going to carry people through their lifetimes.
So, those who will be most successful in the next decade or so are the ones who have a love for learning, are able to effortlessly re-skill and continuously offer value either to their organisations or society at large.
I couldn’t help but think about how this is precisely the stuff that you need to build a great marriage. An openness and a love for learning, the ability to adapt to different life stages with different life skills and continuously offer value in a partnership.
I think we understate the importance of building different life skills at different life stages, especially in a marriage. We look at skills as if they are static. We make partner choices as if a limited set of some 5 attributes, that make for a great wedding, is going to carry us through every situation in the rest of our lives.
I won’t go into why we do this, how we can stop doing this and make better partner choices. I’ll save that for my coaching sessions when people actually ask for help ;)
P.S. - it wasn’t easy to write this. A lot of what remains of my early experiences are visuals, not words. Not feelings, even. They’re probably buried too deep to recollect. So may be I won’t ever get around to writing my account of this after all.