If you’re in a relationship with a ND man, what was your experience?

[user0512]

Hi,

Before I start I’d like to start by saying that I’m not saying that NT people don’t have issues in their relationships and that everything is down to AUDHD. My sister and dad are also ND but my experience with them is completely different to my experience in a romantic sense.

My partner and I have had a rocky patch recently, we’re trying to figure out if we can make things work or not and today we’ve had a very uncomfortable chat about things that aren’t making us both happy. We did discuss calling it quits but decided that we wanted to give things another go and then take it from there.

The problem is he has (I think so anyway) RSD which means he takes every problem I have/way I feel as a personal attack and that can cause issues.
Eventually he tried to see my POV but I do wonder how much of it he actually took in and how he’ll process that and implement it.

It’s led me to wonder how it was for other people? Is there anything that salvaged your relationship during a rough patch? If I did go down the path of calling it quits for my peace of mind I want to be sure I tried to understand the condition and tried any strategies I could before doing that. I know it’s not all on me, and there’s things I expect from him regardless if he were ND or not and despite initial resistance he said he’d work on it, but it does get draining when someone takes everything as an attack.

TIA

Bump

Op, I have an adhd husband with severe RSD.

He is currently going through a flare up and in even normal conversation he finds reasons to be upset.

I can feel him watching me type and feeling rejected as we speak because I'm looking at my phone.

Is he aware? My husband is aware and tries really hard to not let how he feels impact me as he knows it's irrational.

A book that really helped is the adhd impact on marriage.

What is RSD please?

Rejection Sensitivity Disorder

@MissCooCooMcgoodoes he have ADHD too or just RSD? He’s kind of aware but not to the point that he’s mindful as it happens. It’s more here and there he has to be reminded of it and even then he’s defensive and when he cools down he realises again if that makes sense?

I'm married to an AuDHD man who I would say has RSD, though I don't usually trigger it myself. His reaction is usually upset/sadness rather than anger though: he will shut down and not want to talk about things. He finds it hard to apologise.

We have a lot of tricky conversations over text message. It takes the heat out of things. He can process written text more easily than auditory conservation, and I think it takes away some RSD feeling of being under attack.

Both my exDP and I have AuDHD. Unfortunately I had to end the relationship as I would describe him as an extremely defensive and avoidant person, has RSD but struggles to regulate his emotions leading to him getting angry very quickly and would very rarely apologise. This then triggered my RSD and I would shut down. We get along much better as friends and not living together as we seemed to trigger each other and it was never resolved as he couldn’t ever understand why I felt upset with him and would bury his head until things had cooled off then act like nothing had happened. I always needed things to feel resolved and talked through, struggled to drop things and move on without a conversation.

I have a DH with autism. Everything he thinks is “normal” everything I think is bonkers in his head.
I struggle with him a lot, because I pick up on context, whereas he doesn’t, so whilst I will move a social conversation on, he will stick with a topic, regardless of the other persons interest. He also can’t read between the lines; so where I would pick up on someone’s meaning, he wouldn’t.
He has really bad time blindness and often struggles with work-life balance (everything is skewed towards work) and is fiercely loyal.
I have severe PTSD and a very bad anxiety disorder which I developed since I met him. (Through life lessons NOT his fault!) He doesn’t understand them. Because he’s not anxious he doesn’t think I should be (which makes conversation quite difficult at times) and he physically can’t see things like laundry or shopping that need doing because unless it’s directly in front of him he has no object permanence.
That being said, I’ve persuaded him to agree to a new type of holiday! And I know now I have to literally look him in the eye and say “x has set off my anxiety, I need you to do y, in z timeframe, to help me please” and that generally works.

@ToffeePenniesounds like mine except he’s the opposite of a workaholic. He finds working and sticking by to a job difficult (think that may be the ADHD side as autistic people are known to prefer routines) but he struggles to read between the lines, thinks I over react and finds it hard to understand other people’s perspective.

How long would you say it took before you guys were able to find a momentum with his ND? Do you have DC? Did that impact the dynamic at all?

thanks in advance

We have 2 children - 11 (autistic) and 8 (ADHD) I noticed it from the off because I was a SENDCO for 10 years. The biggest impact was when our oldest was going through his assessment, my husband kept blowing up at me and saying “well that’s normal” and I had to carefully tell him that it’s absolutely not normal to only be able to use one particular pen, that it’s not normal to throw up because you have a supply teacher.
All of my son’s experiences were considered “normal” by my husband until he realised our son was autistic and therefore he is too. (And got himself diagnosed)
Since his diagnosis I’ve noticed little things I can do to help him to help me, as well as making it clear to all our friends and family that actually anything weird coming from him is probably his autism.
Im still finding things that I think are unreasonable about his autistic side - things like he can sit for hours and write computer code, but cannot sit in the sun and code for an hour before he gets bored. It’s difficult, but I love him so bloody much, I don’t care!
We find ways around things - for example we have Alexa’s in every room in the house, so we have set alarms 15,10 and 5 mins before we leave the house etc. Work with it, not against it!

@ToffeePennie interesting as I suspect DD (2.5 years old) has ADHD although everyone thinks I’m crazy and I’m labelling her early but I feel like I can just tell.

I know what you mean! A lot of people tell me to just walk away and that I can find someone who doesn’t have RSD and can communicate in a similar way to myself but I feel as though that’s not how love works. You don’t just give up on someone because they have a disability. Although, yes I do agree it shouldn’t make you shrink yourself entirely and you should still have more good in the overall relationship. I just don’t agree with giving up on someone due to a disability when they struggle with something that isn’t their fault. But obviously it should come with boundaries and self respect/preservation too (still learning how to do this)

@chocaholic33 yes DH can be avoidant and defensive but it’s not all the time. He goes through phases and a lot of the time it’s directly linked to how over stressed he is in relation to work. When he’s behind with his finances and having to over work to compensate he’s very avoidant and RSD is very very high but when things calm down he’s more receptive.

Inattentive adhd diagnosis last year 😊

Plus - if able to maintain his routine, he was amazingly reliable. We were financially secure as a result.

Incredibly loyal. No worries about extra-marital relationships.

Downside - ‘out of sight, out of mind. I experienced this as indifference.

Not able to express intimacy except through sex. I am a talker, and need to be talked into intimacy.

Sadly, relationships failed. Children adore him.

I broke up with him after a year. The rigidity and routine-bound stuff was unbearable.

So I’ve learned to be very open and very honest. No subterfuge: “Your mum is annoying me this week. I will ask her to ring you instead of me” “I don’t like how you keep touching my arse, it makes me feel fat, please stop” “I’m having a tough day with my anxiety, I’ve written a list, can you please listen to me?” It makes the conversation much more appealing to DH, and he has a “topic sentence” as to what’s going on. We also have a rule: if I’m going to moan about something I have to tell him, or tell him I have a solution, otherwise he will spend the whole time devising one himself and not actually listening.
I am also very very obvious when I have my therapy sessions for my anxiety and PTSD, I write them into his work calendar and give him Alexa reminders. That way he knows that for 2 hours afterwards I generally need to be left totally alone to process what I’ve been dealing with in the session or sometimes I need to sleep. If it’s going to be a heavy session, my therapist knows I will halt the session to ping a reminder through on his laptop and he will get the bed ready for me (he works from an office annexe in our bedroom) and he will put the warmer on in the bed, a glass of water and some ibuprofen because he knows I usually have a headache.
He can be thoughtful, he just needs reminders to be so. Which works well in our relationship.

I am the only NT in my family. My husband is Audhd and has RSD, my eldest has Audhd and RSD and my youngest has adhd( both teenagers).
I find life extremely hard i cant lie. It feels like being constantly gaslit in my own home as no one else thinks the same as me.
I have had counselling for PTSD and have considered leaving many times.
Probably one of the hardest parts is my husband feeling like he is under attack constantly. The tiptoeing around on eggshells is exhausting sometimes.
We find resolving arguments via text, although i hate it, it seems to be better for him.
As the children have got older and at times harder to deal with,he has not coped at all well and it has fallen to me to try and be the calm one as everyone else has very low emotional regulation. This has been the worst part.
The flip side is they are all very caring people, my husband is kind and thoughtful and i dont have any issues some of my friends have in their marriages such as laziness, being selfish and self centred.
If i was starting afresh i would choose him again, i love him very much and he is a very good person.
But it is difficult.

All of this, me too.

But oh my is it hard sometimes. Solidarity love 🤛

@itsallgoingpetetong @MissCooCooMcgoo

🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻

That is hard hard hard. Understand the experience of being gaslit by the family.

I find it odd that people don't talk about this more, don't you?

There are so many of us out here struggling and needing support from others in the same situation who understand without all the LTB stuff.

I wonder if mumsnet would consider a ND relationships board?

There is a good subreddit that I find soothing to read so I know I'm not going genuinely mad some days.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD_partners/s/MHo06ljtks

There is a thread somewhere on here about having a ND partner. I think it's more aimed at autism than ADHD. It's very long running.

Nearly 30 years and three kids with my autistic husband. He's never been diagnosed but we have two HF kids (diagnosed) and autism in his family. There's no doubt he is autistic but seeing as we only figured it out when he was in his 40s, he's not interested in an official diagnosis now as it wouldn't achieve anything.

He is bad tempered, highly anxious, inflexible, rude, unsociable and very self-centred. He loves boring on about his niche interests and has a negative viewpoint about pretty much everything else.
He is often draining to spend time with so I need time away from him to find my own peace.

On the other hand, he is unfailingly loyal to the family and extremely generous. He is deeply in love with me and always has been. His compliments are frequent, from the heart and second to none. He'd never cheat on me.
He's devoted to the kids as well, despite being such a pain in the arse. They know they can count on dad.
He's a very clever man and you can rely on his rationale and knowledge as well as his problem-solving skills.
He has a fantastic world view and is strongly opposed to sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism and the far right. He dislikes everyone the same...ha ha.
He does more housework than me. Yahoo.

It hasn't been easy...he's a very difficult man.

DH has combined ADHD and dyspraxia, been with him for 20 years. I don’t recognise at all the difficulties others have posted at all. DH is hardworking, polite, caring, never takes his emotions out on others, takes responsibility for himself and his responses to life etc.

A relationship shouldn’t be hard work. If you’re well suited you wouldn’t have the issues you do.

What has he been diagnosed with @user0512 Is it autism or adhd, or both?

The official diagnosis is pending (have been referred by GP) but the screening the doctor did - he scored highly for both ADHD and autism