I see so many families in ruin, or unhappy marriages, on this site. I can't believe it's all doom and gloom...
While living with attention-deficit is never easy (from either side of the fence), I wanted to take a moment, push the "pause" button on the negativity and sadness, and focus on what we all love about our marriages and our spouses. If you're on this site or this forum, it's for a reason, right? Just like you got married for a reason.
My husband and I have been married for 6 years, and we have 2 beautiful, happy children. Our lives are never dull...not with a husband with ADHD and a child with ADHD! But while it can be overwhelming, and tiring, I love my life and my family, and woudn't change it. Here's why, and I'd love to read your stories also.
My husband can turn anything into a game. So much of ADHD literature focuses on the negative aspects, we can forget just how creative they can be. No matter what sort of fit my kids are throwing, my husband can turn it into a game and get them on board.
He's a great playmate for the kids. Being such a kid himself, not only is he able to play on their level, but he helps me to remember that they're only little once, for a brief window, and that I don't want to be remembered for doing chores while they're playing. His play helps me to reconnect with the child inside.
My husband, bless him and the people that raised him, talks to me about things, works with me, and lets me help him through his life. We talk, we laugh, we date, we work together on our marriage and our life.
I know it's challenging, and that it will never be easy. But I'm so glad to have him and our kids in my life.
What do you love about your attention-deficit spouse? What do you love about your marriage?
what i love -- but d&g is real too
Submitted by arwen on
To answer your question:
In my entire life, I've only met one other man that I think I *might* have been able to be married to happily -- he didn't have ADD, but he had many of the positive characteristics of someone with ADD. When my husband and I were separated a few years ago, I never even considered dating other men -- none of the men I knew were even remotely as interesting as my husband.
BUT -- in response to your statement that you can't believe it's all doom and gloom
I feel compelled to say that these aspects of my husband would not be enough to keep us married under all and every situation. They are very important to me -- they are most definitely not simply the "icing on the cake" -- but our "cake" needs more "ingredients" than just these to be successful. The "doom and gloom" came from many years of my husband failing to understand this important point and thus being unwilling to contribute other essential "ingredients" that were difficult for him yet necessary for our marriage to succeed.
You're very fortunate, tazangel, that your married/family life works well enough that you wouldn't want to change it. (Well, so did mine when I'd only been married for six years.) It sounds like your success is not just due to good luck but also to wisdom and hard work, and I congratulate you and applaud you for that. Not everyone is so lucky, however, and not everyone has the means (time, resources, etc) to acquire the wisdom or contribute the hard work. It may not be *all* doom and gloom for them, but please believe me when I tell you from personal experience that some of us have been in some pretty bad situations with our ADD-impacted relationships, where the positive traits were rarely present and sometimes totally absent. Our really bad times with our marriage didn't start till we'd been married for 15 years, when my husband's ADD "grew back in" around age 40. So my first 15 years were like your life is now -- and the next 15 were an unsteady descent into hell. I hope very much you don't have to go through such an experience!
Arwen, believe me, I
Submitted by tazangel36 on
Arwen, believe me, I understand how challenging it can be! No matter how much I love my husband, and how much he tries, there are times the day-to-day of dealing w/ ADHD from an outside perspective gets to be too much. There are times I've wanted to give up, not because he "sucks at things", but just because it's hard. I read these forums to remind myself just how good I do have it, and to give myself the motivation to keep trying.
Clinging, I hope there are many more positive responses to this post. Not just for your sake, but for all the spouses out there. I really think that the ADDs and the nons need to be able to step back and remember the positives. I know from personal experience that dwelling on the negatives just makes things seem that much more bleak, and drains your spirit. And because my husband and I have such a good relationship, despite the challenges that come w/ his neurological illness, I really want to help other couples to build good memories!
I'll admit I was also a
Submitted by Normal Mom on
deleted, see reason at this link
Love the way you think!
Submitted by tazangel36 on
Normal, that's exactly why I started this thread! Remind yourselves what made you fall in love in the first place! What attracted you to your spouse? What do they do right? There are enough threads on here about what they do wrong...and it can be so hard to remember that they don't do it on purpose. I still have to remind myself that my ADHD son is only a child, and that he's still learning, and remind myself of what circumstances have prompted X behavior...
(passage to Clinging deleted, see reason at this link)
not a mind-reader
Submitted by arwen on
Tazangel, I would not have addressed "doom and gloom" if you hadn't mentioned the doom and gloom yourself. You opened the door. I walked through it. I apologize for not realizing that you intended the door to be closed.
Honestly, I thought it was
Submitted by Normal Mom on
deleted, same reason as above
appreciate your comments
Submitted by arwen on
(deleted, directed to Normal Mom, see reason above)
Tazangel's purpose was not so obvious to me. Everybody here comes from different perspectives -- obviously mine is different from yours. To me, "focus" is not equivalent to "tunnel vision". As I said, I apologize for failing to realize what she had in mind. Perhaps my policy of avoiding questioning posters' motives should only extend to what I actually put down in writing.
I'm pretty sure I didn't say that there is always doom and gloom in an ADD marriage, because that is not what I believe -- since I know of ADD marriages where there isn't doom and gloom -- I can't find anywhere in my posts where I've said that, would you please identify where I did? And if I did actually say that anywhere, I apologize for being inaccurate.
I already know why I "walked through the door". Tazangel phrased her opening statement -- "I can't believe it's all doom and gloom." (my italics) Anytime anybody says they can't believe this or that about ADD, it raises a warning flag in my mind. In my experience, just about anything is possible in an ADD relationship. Years ago, when I was in the same kind of situation Tazangel is now, I would have said the same thing that she did, but I have learned since then that at best my attitude was one of naivete -- at worst a dangerous case of hubris that proved detrimental to my family as well as myself. I've learned ADD can change over time -- for better or worse -- and what seems impossible to imagine today can be all too believable down the road. So I "walked through that door", bearing witness that I and others I know have experienced the thing she said she can't believe in, because I am concerned for her (just as I am concerned for *every poster on this site*).
In Tazangel's case, I am concerned that in her disbelief, she might possibly be making a mistake similar to ones I have made. I had the (possibly misguided) idea that if I offered an example of a differing personal experience, it might broaden her perspective in some way that would be useful to her in her future, and possibly also to others reading the thread.
My intent *as always* when I post, is to attempt to bring knowledge to others out of my experience, by telling all the truth about my experience that I can. I try very hard to be as objective as I possibly can and not kid myself or anybody else, because in my experience illusion and ADD can be very dangerous mix. If that makes me a Pollyanna to some (and yes, I have been accused of this many times, although not on this forum) and a "nattering nabob of negativity" to others, so be it.
It seemed to me that the best place to express that information was in response to the post that prompted it. In retrospect, perhaps it would have been less controversial if I had started a new thread to address it. I certainly will consider that possibility in the future.
I agree with your sentiment that we should "all also try to walk in the shoes of the ADHDer readin this forum". Ironically, I actually *have* walked in the shoes of the ADHDer more than most posters here. Some years ago, I had a prolonged illness, and the medications that I was taking induced symptoms and behaviors (and consequences) extraordinarily like what many people experience with their ADD. It was a very distressing and stressful experience, which I have discussed in more detail in other threads. It's true that I hadn't had this experience all my life, so my experience was not exactly the same as that of ADDers, but it gave me a fair amount of insight into many of the difficulties people with ADD have. So I have a considerable amount of empathy for their struggles.
Just because I have empathy, however, doesn't automatically mean that I must agree with their points of view, embrace their preferences or defer to their desires. In the end, I have to be guided when I post by my 30 years of experience with ADD, not just from the side-effects of my own illness and with my husband, but also with my ADD son, all the other men in my husband's extended family (who all have ADD), my daughter's ADD partner and other personal acquaintances in ADD relationships. I don't for one minute think that this makes me any kind of infallible expert, but it does give me a wider background upon which to draw than the average person, and I think that brings value to both ADDers and non-ADDers alike.
In the spirit of this thread -- this evening I asked my husband some questions about positive reinforcement in our relationship, both past and present. He had to dig deep inside himself for the answers, and then find a way to express his feelings in a way that I could understand. I love that he was willing to do this and help me get a better handle on this issue. I love that he has worked so hard to acquire the skills to do these things in the first place -- 10 years ago he wouldn't have had a clue how to answer me. And I told him how much I appreciated it!
My you are a very
Submitted by Normal Mom on
deleted, see reason at this link
all kinds
Submitted by arwen on
Yep -- it takes all kinds to make a world, and we all have our strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncracies. That's why we all have something to learn from each other here.
Whatever Arwen is
Submitted by RowdyD on
Whatever Arwen is (and however much we don't need ad hominem comments on this board) her posts have been consistently some of the most helpful and objective offered.
amen
Submitted by phoenixgirl78 on
I think Arwen consistently proves to be a level-headed voice -- especially in the posts that tend to vent very serious frustrations with ADD spouses. She's usually the one saying, essentially, "It'll take work, but it can be done. Keep at it." She then tends to give an example of some way that she and her husband found balance.
And while I think it's a shame that this topic got off on such a tangent -- perhaps if we'd left it at Clinging to Life's complaint and arwen's rebuttal and had just reinforced the topic with the answers that suited the title, we could have actually fulfilled this goal -- I do understand where Arwen is coming from. She's as against all positive absolutes as all negative ones. So when someone says that she can't believe something is all doom and gloom, my guess is that arwen wants to point out that it's a mix. "Doom & gloom" is such a dismissive phrase that I found myself a little perturbed. I'm sure it wasn't meant to be, but it could easily have been construed as dismissing all the people's pain on here as "doom & gloom" rather than valid concerns, frustrations and, well, pain.
POINT BEING: Could we all just agree to try and be a little more specific about either titles or explanations? As in, in the future, you could specify "Please no negative comments. This is a positive-comments only spot. Any frustrations or another negative emotions are better expressed elsewhere on the board." Or something like that. It lets people know that you understand there are valid concerns, but that you want to get a counterbalance going.
Anyway, here's my list:
1. I love how attentive he is to me. He makes me the most important thing in his life. Before I met him, if you'd described it to me, I'd probably have thought it was smothering or creepy. But it's wonderful to have someone who constantly tells me that he loves me. And it's prompted me to warm up to that.
2. He's got very few boundaries. Yes that can be a problem. But it also tends to show me how crazily tense we all are about stupid things. I freaked out when he was bragging about a raise he got to someone. He was citing the exact amount. I was taught it was gauche to discuss stuff like that. Later, I realized it really doesn't matter. He's also open about asking questions. Sometimes it can have bad consequences, but it also means we find out more about people and things.
3. We complement each other. While often I'm cluing him in to things that he wouldn't have thought of, he provides me with some new concepts too. He thinks of things I wouldn't, and vice versa.
4. He's teaching me to loosen up a bit. I was raised in fear of debt and spending. And while those are good, it's not good to do it up to deprivation in the present. It creates a bit of a binge and purge cycle. He's getting me to realize that we have to have a little fun in the short-term, while still saving most of our energies (and budget) toward long-term goals. I'm not, in other words, constantly living for some future date when everything will be perfect.
5. He is one of the sweetest men I have ever known. He loves me with his whole heart. He accepted me completely, which, sadly, I don't know has ever happened before. And I can be VERY tough to live with. Seriously. But to him it's all part of the package. Since he loves me, it's reasonable to wait out some of the less pleasant stuff. He's really taught me something about what love is, and about accepting people as they are.
6. He'd give me the moon, if he could. I keep telling him I don't need a lot of fancy jewelry or whatever. I don't leave the house that much anyway. (Chronic fatigue.) But he wants me to have everything I want and more. And he wants to be the one to give it to me. Which is sweet, because I absolutely hate how many things I have to deny him too, because of our limited budget. But mainly it's just so un-selfish that it's a bit staggering. He really just wants me to have things that he thinks would make me happy. I just wish he'd get the real point: being with him is better than any amount of jewelry or clothes.
7. He threatens to sleep feed me if I ever lose too much weight. I'm about 30-40 lbs overweight and it's a cause for concern. He tells me that I look gorgeous and he loves my body. And that, if I ever get too skinny, he's going to feed me butter in my sleep. It's become a running joke that can always make me laugh.
8. He understands what it's like to have a condition that affects your life in so many ways -- and have it be completely invisible. He doesn't always get it -- few folks without chronic fatigue do -- but he can empathize with me about wondering if people think I'm making it up or relying on it as an excuse. He gets the insecurity that comes with looking healthy and not being able to cope with the normal demands of society.
9. I love him because he firmly believes in soul mates and that I am his. No questions. He's in it for the long haul (and he's very stubborn) so I have stopped worrying about whether I'm going to push him away when I'm really out of control with my depression. I know it's not easy to love me and live with me, but he just says that he knew the score when he married me.
Other viewpoints
Submitted by tazangel36 on
Arwen, I appreciate your candor. I also appreciate your years of experience in dealing with a spouse afflicted with attention-deficit. I know life hasn't been easy for you.
No, I am not naive. :-) Day by day, any naivete I might harbor is stripped away. I just have a different outlook on life. As my mother-in-law is fond of saying, "You picked it!" which means, if you're living with something, it is because you choose to; if you wanted to change it, you would.
My husband and I have a different marriage from most of our contemporaries. We married later than most, had children later than most, have stable careers, and are both very committed to our family. From what I've read, my husband is a very unusual ADHDer. He's very aware of his issues, and very agreeable to working on them with my help. We share a lot of love and mutual respect, and both of us are committed to keeping our marriage that way. He's a loving husband, pitches in with housework whenever I ask, and loves to spend time with his kids. Are there times I feel like his mom? Sure; that goes w/ the ADHD territory. But it's gone down from several hours a day to about a half-hour a day. This is progress I'm happy with, and, well, "I picked it!"
Arwen, please understand that you haven't offended me, it takes more than a forum post to do that. My only hope is that Clinging, and others like her, can be told (more often than the alternative) that they are good people, that they're worth spending time with, that they're not all screw-ups, and that they have good qualities. Believe me, I'm very aware of the amount of effort required from the spouse to manage the ADHD and symptoms. But just because they do these things doesn't make them bad people; they've heard it enough from others their entire lives! And also, just because they do these things doesn't mean there isn't some room for improvement. Please keep sharing your experiences, as there is always more to learn.
Clinging, and all the other spouses that read this, please take Arwen's comments as they were meant, in the spirit of sharing information. Please don't take them personally, as I don't believe Arwen was attacking anything. She's a great writer, and if she's still married to her husband after all these years, that should say something!
you are generous
Submitted by arwen on
Tazangel, I'm glad to hear I didn't offend you -- not only are you hardworking and wise but you are also generous. I certainly did not intend any offense.
I also definitely wasn't attacking anything, as you correctly interpreted. But I would like to say that I didn't get the sense that Clinging or anybody else thought I was -- my sense was that she just thought it wasn't very nice of me to say anything negative on a thread that was supposed to emphasize the positive. And I can see her point of view -- now. But at the time I was posting my original response to your original post, I was so concerned about and preoccupied with addressing a potential "blind spot", so to speak, it really didn't occur to me how it might strike other readers. Obviously, *I* had a "blind spot" of my own! Which I will be more mindful of in the future.
I remain concerned, however, from reading your recent reply, that I may not have communicated my point very well in the second half of my original reply, and I feel that if I didn't clarify it now, then all this brouhaha would have been wasted. And since I've already spoiled this thread unintentionally, and Clinging has started a new thread to serve your original intention, it doesn't seem to me that I would be doing any great further harm by re-presenting my view. Please understand that in doing this I am in no way suggesting that *you* are naive or anything else -- you seem to have a great handle on your relationship and family situation. But that doesn't mean there couldn't be something you don't understand -- and I'm not sure whether you understood my point, since I don't think I made it very well.
My husband and I did not marry late, but like you we had our children later than most. We both were also in stable careers, and we both also were very committed to our family. My husband in the first 10 or 15 years of our marriage was, like yours, a loving husband, who pitched in with housework whenever I asked, and loved to spend time with his kids. There was even a period of time that he was a Mr. Mom while he was finishing his degree, and while he didn't do the job as competently as I did, I didn't expect him to and was quite satisfied with how he managed. Neither of us knew he had ADD at that time, but that didn't mean we didn't grapple with a few ADD-related issues. Yes, I had to manage the money, and yes, I felt like at times he wasn't being very mature or responsible, but we found ways to make things work to our mutual satisfaction. If we had known he had ADD, I wouldn't have understood why other ADD couples had such problems. It *was* naivete, out of ignorance (which is obviously not a problem you have!) -- and also hubris on my part, because I decided that I could handle "being the only grownup" after our kids were born and it had become clear my husband wasn't going to change. It certainly *was* what I picked.
But, it turned out that my husband's ADD is hormonally related (all the men in his extended family have ADD, and they all have this hormonal connection, but we didn't know that then). When my husband got to around age 40, his (still undiagnosed) ADD began to worsen steadily -- he literally "grew back in" to it in reverse of the "growing out of it" he'd done as a teen going through puberty. Over the next five years, we reached a point where we fought constantly because we constantly miscommunicated. He started getting a lot of traffic tickets and having accidents, even though he'd always been an excellent driver before. His irresponsibility became actually dangerous to our children. He was drinking too much. Almost nothing got done on time. His memory was like a sieve, whereas before it had been fine. And I received no support, no affection, no attention, except on the rare occasion when I would break down and sob my heart out.
I finally got him to see a counselor, who he trusted, who told him he was behaving abnormally and needed a neuropsychiatric evaluation. This produced his ADD diagnosis, after which he began meds and counseling. But it took several years before they made a significant difference. By this time he had gotten into a helpless "I can't" mindset about everything. Although he began to improve, his progress was unfortunately knocked back every winter due to Seasonal Affective Disorder, which had not bothered him in his younger years either but now was growing and compounding his ADD problems.
This period of time was definitely *not* "what I picked". I did what I could to change it -- getting my husband to a doctor for diagnosis, getting counseling, reading, working with him on his issues, changing my expectations, taking on all the responsibilities for our family (in effect becoming a single parent, since during this period of time he was not like a spouse at all, he was like an adolescent with adult legal rights). I made the best of what I had. And it was still bloody awful. The only reason I didn't do something different was because all the other choices available to me were even worse.
My experience is not unique. I personally know of two other ADD marriages where the same kind of thing happened, and I have read of other similar situations on this site. These folks did not "pick" the trap that they have found themselves in. And unfortunately, there is no way to know for sure whether ADD changes like my husband experienced will happen in any given ADD marriage or not.
So, you're quite right, you and I have different outlooks on life. I used to but no longer subscribe to the "you picked it" philosophy, because I've learned that things can happen in life that are in no way what you picked. I'm glad you haven't had this experience, and I hope you never do. Sadly, other posters here who have been less fortunate have ended up in relationships of "all doom and gloom" quite involuntarily and sometimes despite extreme efforts to change it, and like me 10 years ago, may not have any better alternatives available.
I hope this helps you better understand where my perspective is coming from. I'm sure it wasn't your intent to deprecate the situations of people in the situations I've described, any more than it was my intent to attack any person or point of view. I think you have a lot to offer this forum, and I appreciate your insights! We need you -- I'm looking forward to reading more of your posts.
Arwen, Thank you for all of
Submitted by brooks30 on
Arwen,
Thank you for all of your efforts on this forum. It is very clear that you put a lot of thought and detail in your posts and really do try to offer a viewpoint with an open ear and heart.
You have (without your knowledge) helped me through some really hard times.
I applaud your daily courage!
While we are on left brained thinking...
Submitted by brighthorse on
@Arwen: No offense meant...but since we are on left brain thinking...It should go like this:
"I can't believe it's ALL doom and gloom" (Arwen's italics, my CAPS) = I believe it's not ALL doom and gloom
Therefore,
Case 1: It's NO doom and gloom OR
Case 2: It's some doom and gloom + some "non-doom & gloom"
There is no reason to believe, therefore, that Case 1 is the only case that was implied. Honestly, the tone of Tazangel's post + the "left-brained deduction" that Case 2 exists would make me inclined to go with Case 2. Which is why I would probably have not bothered addressing the doom & gloom issue at all, coz Case 2 means Tazangel is aware of the d&g parts.
I know you mean well, and I have learnt greatly from your posts. And your posts are typically very balanced, and I laud you for that.
But on this post, perhaps the objective was to toss that balance away :-)
missed objective
Submitted by arwen on
No offense taken! :) But I don't entirely agree with your analysis, either.
Without getting into a big discussion about how to parse a sentence, let me just say that when I read the "gloom and doom" phrase, I considered what Tazangel might mean not just in terms of the words that actually appeared in the post, but also in terms of trying to figure out what context she meant. The difficulty with the context arises from determing just what the pronoun "it" is referring to, since the word has no clear antecedent in her post. Again, without getting into tiresome details about how one can attempt to infer a context when it is not specified, and all the various permutations of the phrase's meanings that could have been intended depending on the different context possibilities (e.g. "being married to an ADDer"? "everyday life when you have ADD"? "life in a family in ruins with ADD"? "all of the above"?), it seemed to me from the rest of her post that her meaning could very well be, "I don't believe any ADD relationship is ever 100% doom and gloom", where "any" and "ever" would define the inferred context.
To those of us whose ADD relationships have been in such depths for sustained periods that we are well and truly wretched, and the best thing that happens in those periods is that we aren't assaulted by our ADD spouse, a statement like that could seem uninformed, or lacking empathy, or dogmatic, or any of a number of other not particularly desirable characteristics. In the interest of possible enlightenment, I felt it would be worthwhile to address the potential issue. Obviously, though, with hindsight, I see that I should have done it elsewhere.
As I've noted in various other posts on this thread, I missed the objective of Tazangel's post. I was preoccupied by my concern about the "doom and gloom" statement and didn't perceive that I was supposed to effectively ignore it. I realize this may be hard to understand, but I thought her intention was to emphasize the postive, which does not mean the same thing as exclude everything negative. In keeping with that idea, it had been my intention to make additional posts on the thread with only appreciative statements about my husband in them.
Once again, I apologize for my failure to realize Tazangel's intent.
Ah! That be scary!
Submitted by brighthorse on
Point taken :-)
But that be scary...it indeed be! I had really hoped that there would be NO case in the world where there was 100% doom & gloom...ADD or no ADD :( But if I may hazard a guess, even if a true 100% d&g scenario doesn't exist, a bad case of ADD could make it *feel* like it's *100%* d&g.
Keep writing Arwen, and everyone on this forum...No matter if u vent or if you praise...I really feel a majority of posts offer several pieces to take us far far away from the 100% d&G milestone!