Is This Love?

My husband has always been a loving, forgetful, irresponsible, caring, procrastinating, kind and always late type of guy who has never been able to manage finances.  He also has a permanent residence in Denial, USA.  For the past 5 years or so, it has bothered me more and more.  Once our son was finally diagnosed with ADD I began to see the similarities between him and his Dad.

After a long struggle, we finally found the right meds for our son and he is doing so much better than he ever has before.  My husband has gotten worse.  My therapist thinks it's not necessarily that he has gotten worse, but that because our son is doing better I have more free time to look at my own life.

Either way, it can be devastatingly lonely to be married to someone with ADD.  Your spouse becomes your child and you are no longer on the same level.  Instead you mete out these never ending lists of things to do, call periodically throughout the day to remind, send a few text messages to confirm where and when your spouse needs to leave for an appointment and not to forget his keys which are in his gray sweatpants pocket (not the black ones)

The truth is that it is very difficult to be sexually attracted to someone who is so deeply dependent on your lists and reminders in order for them to function slightly below average in their day to day life.  And who wants a nag for a spouse anyway?  This really is a no win situation.


For all their good intentions, a spouse with ADD who is in denial can suck the life right out of you.  Take the wind out of your sails, rain on your parade, kill your buzz, I mean you name it and that's what it feels like.  All at once you are frustrated and angry and the other person has no idea what your all worked up about and assumes it must have something to do with work. . .or your period.

It's not that I don't understand what he is going through.  Our son has ADD and we have talked about alot of things with his psychiatrist.  We've read a lot about it so it is not foreign to us.  But I do think that a spouse has a responsibility to his family to be the very best he can be.

A "Take me as I am" attitude might be met with a "Leave you like you are" response to that selfish position.