Hi, I've NC..Partner and I have been together 2.5 years. I'm calling him 'partner' but we don't live together. We both have teenage kids and live an hour apart. We see each other mid week for a date or sleep at one another's home, and most weekends. He has loads of annual leave and I m self employed so we actually manage to see each other quite frequently. I'm early 50s, he's a few years older, I felt I'd met the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with pretty quickly after meeting him. And I still feel like that - we love each other, we get on well, we have lots of common interests and we both have good friends and hobbies away from each other. Of course, I don't expect things to be perfect but I seem to be getting increasingly irritated with him and I'm worried we might become incompatible.
I am definitely an impatient person and I have to reign in my 'irritatedness' but I honestly do try. He is a lovely, kind, funny, intelligent, affectionate person but I find him quite clunky sometimes. We will be relaxing and he'll suddenly jump up or suggest we do something else. I'll be telling him an anecdote and he clearly isn't listening and he'll get distracted by something pretty standard like a tree (I mean something that he could easily wait a few seconds to remark on but instead will just cut in on the story instead) so I frequently don't tell him news or anything that will take much concentration from him. He has problems sleeping and, particularly in the past, drove me insane by saying hello in the middle of the night, banging into me in bed or asking me to look at something out of the window. We've talked about the fact that after we've cuddled and said goodnight, I don't think want any conversation or contact til morning (I think this is normal!!??) and he says he is fine with this but then occasionally still does stuff that totally pisses me off. Other day, I felt really ill and had to stay extra night at his house. He was lovely, looked after me with glasses of water etc. He said goodnight and was going to sleep in another room (and I know that's really lovely and considerate of him) but then a few hours later, when he was going up to bed, I'd accidentally left his ensuite light on so apparently he assumed I was awake. He said hello loudly and woke me up. I know this sounds minor but I was feverish and felt horrendous and had just dropped off to sleep...I felt so upset that he'd woken me up again!!! I know he doesn't mean to do it. It's like he's incredibly clumsy around social and sleep norms. He thinks he has ADHD and I have close family members who are neuro divergent so whilst I know there are many and varied characteristics of ADHD, I do recognise some of them. It's obvs not a problem in the least that he's probably ND,but I do worry that he can't seem to recognise that the sleep issues are a problem for me. I think writing this down make me sound like a proper diva. I don't think I am but I am definitely not the most easy going person either. Does this relationship sound hard work?