Hi, new here. I'm diagnosed ADHD, but due to some immersion experiences that occurred naturally in my adult life, I manage it all right and am not being medicated for it. I have the hallmarks of ADHD but never really found a medication that made a noticeable difference for me. I'm thinking of pursuing treatment since I'm falling behind in my professional life (after a very undistinguished academic career...) and having difficulty focusing on professional development and job hunting. But at the moment, I hope there are people who understand what I am going through.

It's been a really difficult ten-ish years with my (more ADHD) wife and I'm now audiobooking the Orlov book and am in (individual) counseling. Several things about her were like night and day before and after we married. We had lived separately in the same town beforehand. Probably most important was that after we got married she was revealed to be effectively unemployable due to being unable to cope with working under supervision or management. It's a trait that nobody would realize from knowing her; she's very sunny in disposition in public. But correction has to be presented to her SO gently and she needs to have her own ideas of how to do just about anything (creative outlet), so she always came home upset about work. The signs weren't strong enough when we were dating because she said some of her coworkers also disliked how their manager handled them. She changed jobs then and again while we were engaged, and then she started losing jobs or bringing home so many complaints every day that I eventually wanted her to quit, it was just too much. My parents have viewed her as a disappointment for a long time and pick up a lot of slack, and resent it, which is also difficult.

Being self-employed was also too much for her, she lost us thousands of dollars trying to run her own homemade educational goods business AND she required almost daily input from me to get any of it done. She didn't even really ask before committing us. More recently, she got hyperfixated on gardening, so we're now growing vegetables that mostly go to waste and cost way more than store-bought. I said, "why not grow berries? We'd eat all of them and they're expensive to buy". NOPE. Has to be the produce that's already the cheapest at the store for some reason and almost all of it rots in our kitchen before it can be used. And now she wants chickens.

After we got married, she took a deep dive into the world of "functional medicine" and never wants to treat any condition with pharmaceuticals if she can help it, even after our son's behavior has benefited from some. (That took years of arm twisting before she'd allow it.) Spurious supplements prescribed by a "real doctor" bring benefits to her mood and attention that I'd rate as no greater than positive thinking, but her perception of their effect is magnified, she swears by them, and she doesn't want to be any better. Meanwhile, the dishes and laundry pile up if I don't REMIND her to do them. They always need doing, but I have to remind her that they exist? And my clothes smell like mildew if I don't do them myself. I tell her "you should set a timer for the laundry, you can't forget to dry them if you do that". She won't do it unless I remind her to set the reminder. Until recently, I was supposed to be working remotely, full time, not backseat driving our household. We can't ever have anyone over because the house is never reasonably clean. And this is all WITH my additional assistance. I feel like I'm in prison, I'm always ashamed of our home. And it's not a problem that I can throw money at, I don't have it. I feel like our family is unequal to other people and has to hide. There isn't enough time for me to pick up all the slack around here.

Our children have always been dressed out of mixed up laundry baskets too. Even when she does fold their laundry, she never, ever puts it away, so it ends up just getting messed up in the baskets. She gets tired or distracted before she can put it away. I told her, why not just try taking the laundry (I sorted) upstairs and fold it INTO the dressers, that way her work CANNOT be wasted or undone. She agreed that this makes sense. She just will not do it this way, she has to have her own ideas.

Can I continue to live this way? Probably. I'm just very unhappy. We both are. But she will not change. I have a very self-sufficient outlook and always want to improve myself. She will not come along for the ride.