One of the things I've learned living with my ADHD husband is things are DIFFERENT. In many situations things cannot be based on "real world" conclusions, methods, thinking,conclusions, tools etc.

It really is like living in a parallel world. I often jumped to conclusions because in my life before him, 1+1 = 2, not always true with ADHDers. Navigating their thinking, responses behaviors can be a treacherous, confusing maze.

An example, many years ago he had a job he loved, he poured his heart into it and was pretty successful. I worked there part-time occasionally. He learned he had skills in marketing, people skills etc. financially we were doing really well. It was a good time for us. I also worked at my son's private school to pay the tuition.

I thought the worse was behind us. Then out of the blue he became severely depressed. He would come home, go straight to bed and not talk to me at all. When I tried to get him to talk to me, he refused. It got worse, I would lay next to him trying to comfort him and he'd push me away. I tried to initiate sex, he'd get angry.

This went on fortwo months. I slept in the guest room, crying night after night. He was sullen, and the rare occasion we had to communicate, he'd be snarky with me.  He was working later and later and at times his employees could not find him at work. I became suspicious. It got so bad, I lost 15 lbs. Already underweight, it got dangerous. My friends became concerned and insisted I go to the hospital. I mentioned this to him and he just walked away.

He had been helping a girl at work, having her babysit our son, pet sitting, things like that. One day he sent her to our house, to me, after calling and saying he had to get her out of the place of business, she had swallowed a bunch of pills and came to work. I said ,send her to the hospital or her mother. He said she won't go. So I let her come and checked her out, and told her to rest, then I would make arrangements for her to get help. My husband had called her mother, but the mother refused to help.

She finally left. Something about the whole situation bothered me. I brushed it off. A few nights later around 2 a.m. his cell phone rang downstairs. He was asleep, he had come home around  1 a.m. I picked up his phone, it was a text message, saying. "can I keep u?." I checked all his text messages and found about 26 of them. Back and forth. It was not business at all to say the least. I went crazy. I ran upstairs and threw the door open to his room and screamed at him. He came out looking lost, In all the years I've been with him, never got physical, but I lost it and slapped his face as I screamed WTF are you doing?

He was absolutely furious. Somehow we got downstairs .Then he said I have NO idea what you are talking about. Once all the rage and tears subside on both parts, we looked into it. Apparently this girl had been using his phone at work, taking it off his desk, texting her bf and keeping it until she got a response from her bf. He thought he was misplacing it, puzzled when he would find it on his desk again. He didn't text anyone. So he had no idea those texts were there.

We confronted her. She was nasty with us. Apparently her bf didn't know it was not her phone and he was drunk when he texted that message so late. Hubby was livid, "I help you and this is how you pay me back!!" I contacted the bf and told him the situation. He fired her soon after for other reasons.

His behavior and circumstances made me do the 1+1 =2, he must be cheating assumption.

The incident however, made him seek help for his depression, and it came out that his employer was considering laying him off. (Which they ultimately did.) So now, he works really hard to keep me informed on his emotions, what is going on at work and in general.

I've learned to ask him things before jumping to conclusions, in a non accusatory way. Their habits, forgetful, things like that can get them in trouble especially if other people take advantage of that.

It still took a long time to heal from that,  to trust each other, because there was a lot of other things which I didn't get into.