ADHD and Marriage - Part#2

Over the weekend, the husband and I were having a discussion that escalated into a fight for no good reason. That night, he slept in the guest room, and I spent half the night doomscrolling on r/adhdpartners. I just wanted to feel less alone.

When I wrote this post about ADHD or this one about neurodiversity, I realise I’ve always found it incredibly difficult to articulate my experience with this. It’s deeply personal. I’ve even struggled to do this on my private blog where I am the only audience. I don’t quite know why.

So, today, I am forcing myself to write this very specific post to illustrate one of the many ways in which ADHD manifests in our marriage, because reading accounts of others has immensely helped me navigate my own marriage.

I am writing this in the hope that it can help someone, somewhere, someday. As I’ve said before, there isn’t a singular experience with neurodiversity, so I can’t speak for everyone. I can only share our experience, or at least how I perceive it.

Emotional Intimacy

One of the biggest challenges with an ADHD marriage is emotional intimacy.

My husband has a hard time understanding my thoughts or feelings when I don’t explicitly articulate them. Even when I do, he processes them much like a software program as a sequence of instructions, devoid of any context.

For eg, when we have an argument, I usually go quiet. I take time to process my thoughts before I talk. His brain has registered my silence as a distress signal, and so when “his pattern recognising brain” sees me being quiet (which happens often because I am an introvert), it assumes that I must be upset and triggers the “fight” response.

He will keep asking me if I am upset, to the point where he will actually upset me just by persisting. There is a tendency to overcompensate for his lack of empathy by reading incorrectly between the lines. He has a hard time trusting that I am aware of his condition, and hence, able to communicate rather directly with him, if necessary.

I don’t blame him for not trusting me because I wasn’t always like this. Like most wives, I used to wish that my husband guesses my mood or needs on his own, surprise me and so on.

But once I learnt about his condition, and made peace with it (which has taken years), I have stopped living with any illusion regarding his emotional capabilities; I prefer being more explicit.

In fact, it works very well in our case now, because one of my “issues” growing up was that I was too direct, and have tried for years (not successfully) to be a bit more subtle. But now? I don’t have to bother, especially with my husband.

While I have been able to update my priors about his capabilities (albeit slowly), the husband has been taking much longer to do the same with mine. I am not entirely certain if people with ADHD have trouble updating their priors regarding others’ capabilities, or if this is specific to the husband.

He is a strong believer of innate talent (if you aren't already familiar with his studs and fighter framework), so he has trouble processing that people can learn. So, maybe that also makes it hard for him to learn to trust that I am capable of more direct communication now, unlike earlier.

Anger

While I’m fairly accustomed to this pattern of our arguments, the bit that I still have a lot of troubling coping with is the intensity of his fight response, and the unpredictability of it, even after these many years of being together.

The fight response turns aggressive, quite unpredictably. He will either raise his voice, or do something that’s physically intimidating, completely out of the blue.

Initially, I used to feel very scared and shut off during these abrupt violent outbursts, making it worse. I grew up in a very peaceful household. No one yelled at anyone, so I didn’t have much practice in combat.

He would get more triggered by my silence, and he’d get more intimidating to elicit a response. He’d always blame me for his behaviour (sometimes still does, but only in the moment). He strongly believed that I’d trigger his aggression, and if not for my actions (or the lack of them), he’d be completely fine.

For the longest time, I believed that too.

Accountability

It takes two to tango, right? In any marriage, when your partner accuses you of doing something over and over again (even if they’re gaslighting you), you start believing it to be true, at least if you are neurotypical, or conditioned to be one.

So, I’d hesitate to discuss our marriage with friends, because I thought I was a bad wife. I wanted to do everything in my power to “fix this”. I experimented with different strategies (some pleasant, some not).

I have learnt to respond faster, he has learnt to back off when he’s close to getting triggered. We are able to de-escalate fairly quickly now, most of the time. Over the years, we developed a ritual that wasn’t intuitive to either of us, but we try.

While the incidence of these violent outbursts have reduced over the years, I can’t help but feel a sense of despair. Years of medication, therapy and lifestyle changes have done little to fix it (I could write an entire post about this).

The optimist in me believes that this can be repaired. But for repair, you need to first acknowledge that something is broken and take accountability for fixing it, which is a big challenge with ADHD (you will notice this pattern when you read all the accounts on r/adhd).

Epigenetics

When you have ADHD, you go years trying to fit into a neurotypical world, in vain. As an adult, you feel violated for not being understood, lash out in response to slightest criticism and you end up not taking responsibility for your actions. You feel like you’ve tried long enough to fit in and you don’t owe anyone anything.

Except, in an intimate relationship, when the other person accepts you as you are and is willing to put in the work to understand you, you owe them something - some trust. It’s not easy for the person with ADHD to understand this, but as a partner, one can only hope that they will at some point.

Having gone through therapy myself, educating myself about mental health and reading several accounts of ADHD partners on the internet (thank god for that, because I didn’t have access to this in the initial years of our marriage), I have come to realise that his condition has nothing to do with me.

He was probably born with it. Some of the behaviours that stem from ADHD should have been addressed a long time ago, when he was a child, both at home and at school. There is evidence for psychosocial behavioural therapy to be an effective treatment for ADHD; it helps them overcome impairments in daily life, with skills that serve them well into adulthood.

But as an adult himself today, it is upto him to overcome his conditioning, develop the skills and tools to engage constructively in a relationship, with all its ups and downs. It’s not easy, but not impossible either. I can only hope that he is able to, someday.

This change in perspective has immensely helped me - I no longer live with a victim mindset. I don’t need to beat myself up about not being able to “fix” it. I accept him as he is (just as he does with me), and treat his condition as constraints that I need to work with (helps that I like problem solving).

Silver Lining

But hey, I have learnt that all is not doom with ADHD. I leverage the husband’s inability to read social cues or regulate his social interactions quite effectively. Of course, I am not going to tell you guys how I do that now ;)

I’ll sign off with a video of the husband and I talking about our marriage.