Fully prepared to be told I'm being unreasonable, but this is driving me round the bend and I finally snapped a bit today. My partner has a habit of entering a room already talking to me without checking to see if he's interrupting me. I could be reading, writing, working, listening to a podcast - doesn't matter. It seriously winds me up. To be honest he talks quite a lot and doesn't always provide context for what he's talking about. It can be confusing for me and I have to ask a lot of clarifying questions and I feel like a captive audience sometimes (he'll be going on about cars, for example, when he knows I'm not that interested). For full disclosure I am neurodivergent, so it's likely that interruptions and lack of quiet time to myself cause me more distress than is the norm.
I always listen to a podcast or audiobook when I cook, clean and garden, so usually my hands are full or dirty when he interrupts me and I can't quickly pause what I'm listening to without faffing around a bit first. I've asked him many times to please catch my attention before he starts speaking, or better yet just leave me be unless it truly can't wait, because I'll have to drop what I'm doing, clean my hands etc and then find my phone to pause what I'm listening to. We have plenty of time during the day to talk so it's not like he wouldn't have another chance to say whatever it is. However, he has continued to just enter the room and start speaking without seeming to notice my irritation at being interrupted.
Today I was out in the garden sowing some seeds, headphone in, phone clear across the garden and out of reach for quick pausing. He rocked up to me and just started speaking during a climactic scene in my audiobook (The Battle of Helm's Deep in the Lord of the Rings, if you must know) so I sighed and took one earbud out and until he finished and walked off. I carried on gardening feeling miffed that I missed a bit of the book. Suddenly he's shouting up at me from the bottom of the garden, so I had to take my earbuds out again and shouted that I couldn't hear him over the wind and road noise. He kept talking and I still couldn't hear a word, so I had to get up and walk towards him to hear, and it turns out he was just saying something about airing out the shed - nothing I needed to be informed about. He then went back into the house and I was irritated at this point.
It might not seem a big deal, but when it happens every time I try to have some time to myself to listen to my book, the frustration really builds up. I approached him and explained that I felt really frustrated and distressed about being interrupted so often when we've spoken about this in the past. He didn't look up from his phone and gave a perfunctory apology. I tried to get him to discuss it with me, explaining that I find it very distressing, we have talked about it before, so I'm wondering why it keeps happening when he knows it upsets me. He says he thinks he has ADHD and can't be expected to have impulse control and not interrupt me (paraphrasing but that's the gist). I said that's not really fair and he can at least wave to get my attention so I can pause my audio. The conversation went in circles until he got angry with me and now I'm downstairs crying and he's shut up in his office in a mood.