I met this women almost a year ago. I seemed relieved finally could put up with my ADHD and non ADHD idiosyncrasies. I was the typical ADHD attention seeker for the first couple of months. The downside is that she was pretty clueless about some of the day to day events and had problems with interpreting what people were interacting with her. Even her daughter took advantage of her. I became her advisor of sorts, me and my impulsive behavior and disorganization. I would analyze the interactions with her daughter and she followed them and their relationship seems to have improved. Other events like helping her to quit smoking I helped her in the process. Don't get me wrong i wasn't perfect. I felt pity for her that she was oblivious to the things going on around her and continues analyze things and life events with a faulty logic. She doesn't acknowledge me verbally a lot of times when I speak with even a simple ok I hear you. I get plenty of affection and all of that. I feel like we are on different pages or even different books. I suppose I could attribute our differences by me growing up as a child of an alcoholic mother and divorced and remarrying parents living in the city whereas she grew up in a small town with sort of distant parents. Overall in conversation I have a lot more to say where she doesn't talk near as much. She is working on her PhD in Nursing. I have 2 Bachelors degrees along with some grad experience. I don't know what to do after so many failed relationships someone that respects my intelligence and my ideas and my problematic behavior like loing my license for excessive driving violations including driving 100 in a 55 mph zone. She doesn't say or do anything remotely interesting to me.
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Submitted by Faded and borin... on
I was clinically diagnosed for ADHD as an adult which included a long battery of tests. The co-morbid Major depressive disorder was diagnosed earlier in adulthood and the treatment professional recommended these tests.
Being Bored Is an ADHD Symptom
Submitted by kellyj on
I will phrase this differently by asking this question......Is it, that your partner is boring or is it that you find her boring? Can people actually be hypocrites....or are they hypocritical at times? I'm not implying here with this but it does change how you see someone even within the wording. Compartmentalizing people is a bad habit to get into and one I have to watch myself all the time because it is so easy to do. I learned this from living with my mother who also had this habit and it can be infectious if it is the only way you can relate to someone who does this chronically.... but it does sounds like the problem between the two of you is in how you relate differently to things than she does. The is not a right or wrong, good or bad.....it's just a difference. If it were me, I would try to interpret her instead of you trying to get her to interpret you.
Your girlfriend sounds remarkably similar from your description to my dear mother (now deceased) which is why I mentioned her. She use to drive me absolutely crazy at times when I would try and communicate with her until I finally learned that the words she used had very specific meanings that were all based on one common theme ...fear and danger. No matter what you said to her, as innocuous as the topic could be....she would find something in it to be afraid of and to fear as being potentially dangerous. Once I learned to apply this to everything she said.....things suddenly began to make sense. Before that......no amount of logic or analyzing could ever explain what she was saying. And because she could only relate by compartmentalizing things and people in this way, I had to learn to talk to her using her compartmentalizing language before she could understand me. That is how you can start doing this yourself even if you don't think this way about things (or people) in general. Between my mother and the rest of the world it seemed....she was speaking a completely different language and all roads lead to fear and danger all the time in every conversation.
Once I understood this about my mother.....I began to address fear, danger and being afraid into every thing I talked to her about right up front. Once I did this with her.... I could then move on to finding out what I really needed to know like what time we were having dinner that night and actually get a real answer. lol
I would not say my mother was boring....but relating to her in this way was definitely tedious at times and tested my patience but... if I wanted to have a relationship with her at all, it was simply required that I do this even if I didn't have to do this with anyone else. And there were those days....I just didn't have the energy but that was all about me and my capacity to have this kind of patience which had nothing to do with her.
(FYI I have ADHD just to be sure....but I also suspect that mother had it too but was never diagnosed )
J