I just need to vent. So, I apologize for bad grammar, spelling, and whatever else.
Quick summary of the relationship: I met my soon-to-be ex-husband in 2009, we moved in together in 2010, and married in 2013. He told me very early in our relationship that he had ADHD, and that he did not take medication because he was in law enforcement and the National Guard. Our relationship was fairly smooth until the end of 2014. Four months after we married, he deployed for 10 months. While he was deployed, we bought a new house together and I got us moved in as much as I could on my own so he could settle in with minimal disruption. I eventually moved out in September of 2016, and he asked for a divorce and began sleeping with another woman within a month.
This woman wound up leaving him in December of 2016 because he was still hung up on me. So, he came to me and asked if we could try counseling with a new therapist. I agreed because even if it didn’t work out between us, I needed to understand my role and my mistakes so I didn’t repeat them in the future with someone else.
So, what happened in detail...
Husband returned home at the end of October 2014, and by that Thanksgiving I was sick with walking pneumonia for almost 2 months. During that time it was very hard for me to do strenuous activity, so most common activities (like walking up stairs) left me breathless and in pain. This put a strain on intimacy in our marriage, and it led to my husband yelling at me about the lack of intimacy and finally adopting the refrain that he would never ask me for sex again. And I say refrain because I began to worry about our marriage and would ask him if we were ok, and he would respond by saying yes, and reminding me that he would not be asking me for sex.
In early 2015 I changed jobs to one much closer to home, giving me a 30-minute commute instead of a 2-hour one. We both thought it would give us more time together, and it did, but with it came more problems. My new job was in a bigger company with more challenging work and more work to do period. I started getting sick again, and was becoming very stressed out, so I told my husband I needed help because I was stressed and felt like I couldn’t keep up with things. He told me he didn’t “see it” and didn’t offer to help more around the house. During this time, though, he started to get really sexually aggressive with me both in and out of the house.
I eventually became so miserable and unhappy that I started to push back and tell him to stop doing things like saying sexually inappropriate things to me in public, or to stop trying to poke at my private areas while driving (both when he was driving, or when I was driving). This started a smear campaign. Suddenly not only was I lying about being stressed, but I was lying about being sick and me asking him to go to the store to pick up medicine was all me acting. He told his family, coworkers, and soldiers in his Guard unit about our marital problems. He told people I was a psychopath and that I had emotional problems, something he is still doing to this day.
And in response, people told him I was cheating on him and he needed to get a lawyer to protect himself. We started couples therapy, but the woman was really irresponsible--she kept confusing my husband and I with another couple, and was sending us emails accusing us of things the other couple had said to her or done to her. So, this obviously didn’t work and I put an end to the therapy.
I was never cheating on him. I was always home on time after work. When I went out with coworkers, I invited him and he even joined on occasion. He spent a lot of time belittling my friendships, so I hadn’t seen or spoken to my 2 close friends since our wedding in 2013. I also kept contact with best friend who had moved to New Zealand 6 years prior to a minimum (we used to chat on skype everyday for an hour to keep up with each other), because he was annoyed that I would want a maintain what he considered a fake friendship. I wound up quitting my degree program because the time I spent on that took too much time away from him and led to fights.
Finally, things got so bad that he stopped contributing to anything around the house and left me to handle it all. I paid the mortgage, and he kept paying utilities, but he stopped doing anything around the house except cutting the lawn. I found another therapist, this time in the nearest major city--they had great reviews and were featured in multiple magazine articles, had a thorough intake process, and had excellent communication. My husband wouldn’t go see her because she was downtown, and accused me of picking someone in the city so he wouldn’t go see her. I gave up when he still accused me of sabotage despite me showing him her credentials and explaining to him that the group she worked with could also help us if we need to do sex therapy or individual therapy.
When I finally moved out, he was begging me to come back after 2 weeks because he couldn’t afford the mortgage, utilities, and take care of himself or the house. I refused, and the fighting got worse until he told me he was filing for divorce. In December 2016 he came back asking if we could at least try therapy again, and I said yes. At which point he admitted he began sleeping with a woman in October 2016--a month after I had moved out--but she left him because he wasn’t over me. I will be honest that this pretty much destroyed any hope of resuscitating the relationship, and I told him that, but we both decided to at least finish the number of therapy sessions the therapist recommended we try.
I did tell him that I didn’t want to rekindle the marriage, and this sent the smear campaign into overdrive. He told me he wanted an amicable divorce, but he set up a double standard for communication--I couldn’t talk about work to him, but he could tell me about his work. I wasn’t allowed to feel sad about the way things went, only he was. I would get texts from him with jabs about me going to turn into a crazy cat lady, or telling me I’m a “stiff cock”. It got old, and I stopped responding whenever he texted. We now haven’t spoken in almost 2 weeks, and it’s nice.
So, in the end, I’m left trying to understand how much of this was due to him having untreated ADHD, and how much of it was just things like incompatibility or inability to resolve conflict effectively. My closeness to the situation makes it hard for me to see all of that, I think. Regardless, for as sad as I am that it went this way, I am glad to be away from him.
A lot of this is NOT ADHD
Submitted by Chevron on
(Small edits.)
iamlammypi,
I'm married to a man with ADHD who does not act like your husband.
If you were still sick with pneumonia, and/or still recuperating from it, his getting angry with you because you were still sick and not fulfilling his sex need, and furthermore decided to punish you by cutting out sex entirely were not only NOT ADHD, what he did was not something that any spouse should do to another spouse. It's very juvenile to get mad at someone because she's sick and can't perform sexually according to one's own pleasure. There ARE periods that married couples do not and cannot have sex. He's not being ADHD self centered, he's being selfish about sex. There's a difference.
When your work and stress from outside the house increased and you told him that you needed help to do the inside the house tasks led to him a) getting sexually aggressive with you inside and outside in public and b) not helping, no neither of those is produced by ADHD. There's NOTHING in ADHD that makes it impossible for someone to increase lending a hand at home. Which tasks the ADHD person does is another question.
If you can, do your best to ignore his lying to people about you. You can't control other people lying or passing around gossip that is untrue. Eventually, your husband will be known as the liar he is, but that's not for you to accomplish. He'll do himself in on that one himself. You can't stop other people from saying to other people what they choose to say. The only option in that situation is to go on about your business. You know you didn't do what he said you did. I know this is very upsetting. My sympathy to you.
You need contact with people. Be sure that you have reliable people about you, whether friends or family, to whom you can tell what is going on to you, and tell them the truth from time to time, without lying about him. You don't sound like you're a liar anyway, but now it's especially important for you to take the high road and for people to know what's really going on with you. It's always true that friends or family are outside your situation, so understand that you need to listen to their advice if they want to give it but understand that they're giving advice based on only part of what's going on with you. Listen, but you decide what's good for you. Appreciate that no matter how much you tell them, they'll not see all that's happening to you. Pick people who are not gossips and can listen to you. It is very, very lonely to be abused verbally and psychically at home, but no one knows what is being done to you. So you need people to know what's happening to you. This will help you emotionally get through this period, and later you may or may not need people to give testimony about what you're going through..
A suggestion about that therapist: if your partner refuses to go to marriage counseling, for whatever reason, and you've found a good therapist or marriage counselor, go without him. It will be all right to do that. Therapy is also a safe place to tell what's happening to you. You don't need to ask your husband for permission to do this, especially if you or your own insurance is paying for it. To give up on getting some therapy for you from a good source, because he gets mad about it will just be one more thing that he's bullying you about, and it will encourage him to bully you more, because he sees he's getting away with what he's doing. You don't even need to tell him when you have appointments. If you do therapy, tell the therapist immediately why you need therapy, and what his punitive reactions have been to you getting sick or having trouble juggling your job and work at home, and if the person is good they will help you with scheduling.
Glad you found the site. It's a good place to vent. I can't tell what I think about your husband, but he's being very aggressive and punitive with you right now, so keep an eye out for your privacy in posting here. Do that.
My opinion? From what you write, your husband is WAY behind the ADHD maturational curve. Meaning, he's not handling his anger, himself, his relationship with you, and some other things as well as many other ADHD adults do. He's responsible for his feelings, he's responsible for growing up, he's responsible for the consequences of his actions, and he's responsible for his ADHD. Whether or not he takes responsibility for any of this and improves any of it is NOT a product of ADHD.
Therapists are in the business of helping people, whatever their problems are with themselves and in relation. I'll bet that one would help you.
Chevron
I agree with the ADHD maturational curve statement
Submitted by iamlammypi on
In fact, you make a good point about his lack of responsibility. He mentioned repeatedly that he refused to take medication as an adult because of his jobs--it would get him kicked out. He also justified his refusal to take medication with how it made him feel when he was diagnosed in middle school, 20+ years earlier. Even if he didn't want to take medication, he could have at least seen an ADHD coach or a therapist. That would require him to be more self-aware than he is currently, I suppose.
His actions and reactions during this time (separation and divorce) haven't shown that he is interested in acting mature. According to him, I'm not allowed to mourn the loss of my marriage. He has even told me that I shouldn't feel sad since he is giving me what I wanted: Divorce. In his mind, he might have filed for divorce...he might have been the one who even said he wanted it first, who went and started a relationship a month after I was moved out...but it is still all of my fault.
It is just another instance of him not accepting that I could act or feel in a way different than how he thinks I should.
Thank you for your response to my post.
Your husband may have ADHD,
Submitted by Janenna on
Your husband may have ADHD, but in this case that is not the problem. The problem, I'm afraid, is that you are in an emotionally abusive marriage. I am so very sorry. :-( I agree with the previous poster. Much, if not most, of your relationship problems and your unhappiness are not caused by the ADHD. If your husband is blaming the ADHD, it is just a useful peg for him to use to avoid facing up to the fact that he is emotionally abusive.
I know that I am being blunt and it may be hard to read, but someone very dear to me spent years in an emotionally abusive marriage and I saw the damage that it did to her. You have not been married that long and so I am being very direct in the hope that you will take action and not suffer as she did.
Even the title of your post reveals that your husband has persuaded you that the problem is yours - your behavior is causing him to be the way he is. . My dear, the fault does NOT lie with you, but with your husband. Blaming the victim is typical not only of emotionally abusive partners but of physically violent ones, too. And you mentioned his escalating sexual aggression, which is also a cause for great concern.
So you weren't able to have sex with him the moment he returned from deployment? That's sad, but you were ILL forgoodnesssake! If he were less selfish, he would have put your needs first, been patient, like other loving husbands of sick wives, and would have done what I presume that loving husbands on deployment do to deal with their own needs, for a little while longer. Talking with a close friend about one's marital problems may help: telling anyone who will listen about them (especially if it involves details of intimate problems) is totally unacceptable. But, as "Snail" has pointed out, eventually rational people will realize that the picture of you that he has painted is nothing like the real you. (Anyone who doesn't tumble to it will probably be as deluded as he is and not worth your time worrying about!)
Anyway, I could go through your post point by point, trying to show you how obvious the emotional abuse is to an outsider, but it probably won't help and may render you still more miserable. My recommendation would be that you forget the ADHD problems for now and instead start to research emotional abuse within marriage. There are numerous web sites that have lists of questions for people to ask themselves, if they think they might be in such a relationship. I would most earnestly urge you to read some of them and ask yourself those questions. It may be hard to accept the truth, but acceptance and understanding is the first step toward healing.
I am so glad that you have already had the courage to achieve a degree of separation. Many wives (including the person I mentioned) could not even do that. In my opinion you should absolutely NOT give this marriage another chance, however hard your husband tries to persuade you to return. Things will almost certainly never change, despite what he may promise. He needs a lot of therapy and he does not want it. One day he might, but it will be too late - if you wait for him to want it, or to change, you will endure still more pain and misery. Please, please, I beg you, do not relent.
Please believe me that marriage, even to someone with ADHD does not have to be like yours. Detach from this man and you will one day meet someone from whom you will learn what being truly loved and happy really means. I wish you well.
I have no intentions of returning to him
Submitted by iamlammypi on
You are not the first person to tell me that he is emotionally abusive. After his new girlfriend dumped him and I went to see a therapist with him, the therapist during the third or fourth session wanted to meet with me individually to tell me his assessment of things and ask me some more questions. He came out with the very same thing--emotional abuse. So, it is not hard to read. It is the reality of the situation.
There will be no second chance for this marriage. I moved out for a reason, and that was because I would prefer being single to being married to him. I stayed living alone during the sessions with the therapist, and I am still living alone now that he has filed for divorce again. He has tried multiple times to get me to come back. His tactics have ranged from a really angry and aggressive conversation centered around "you have to come back because I've changed", to things like sharing his inability to take care of himself and sudden multiple health issues.
I think I was expecting some of these issues with him to be linked to emotional dysregulation (a feature of his ADHD that the above-mentioned therapist spotted) and maybe there is some of that at play here on some level. But, I suppose that really isn't for me to unravel. The issues I described in my original posting (sexual aggression, refusing to believe me when I was stressed or sick) are his to deal with regardless of them being related to his ADHD or not. I can't play any further role in his life once the divorce is finalized.
Thank you for responding to me.
Disregulation or choice
Submitted by Chevron on
Hi, Iamlammypi,
I dont have ADHD. My husband does. One of the hardest things I've had to figure out and get it right, and it's an ongoing thing, is the kind of question you brought to the board: is this behavior a direct result of ADHD or is motivated by something other than ADHD? It matters to know.
I'm so glad that you're living separate. Stay safe. Have a support network.