ADHD partner here - first of all I want to acknowledge that every ADHD marriage will be different, so I don't claim to speak on behalf of your ADHD partners/ex partners - I'm just concerned for my own non-ADHD partner and I'm not really sure how to address it.

Essentially it feels to me like she thinks she has to save everyone else from their chaos - because no one else will, but that this is an expectation she puts on herself, not something I feel like everybody else actually wants her to do (especially not if they saw how it was affecting her)

I think this is how a lot of the parent/child dynamic in our relationship came about - over the years, especially before ADHD was even on our radar, I repeatedly showed "I'm not capable of doing X" so she'd decide that this was something she had to do for me, to make sure it got done, and I guess this is where I as an ADHDer find it hard to agree - I find it hard to get board with the mindset that "the thing getting done" is an absolute imperative, and "the thing not getting done" is always an objectively unacceptable outcome and to be avoided at all costs. I get that "the thing not getting done" might create consequences - I'm also fully aware of the fact that sometimes these consequences are unacceptable, and as such there are times when the thing absolutely has to be done, but it feels like she takes on the burden for absolutely everything - even stuff that should reasonably be allowed to slip.

To give you some fairly trivial examples -

She used to iron my shirts for work - which might sound like a very odd complaint because clearly, I wasn't going to get around to it myself (not a gender thing at all btw - I don't have anything against doing the task, I'd just never find the time) and it was clearly a burden on her time but the thing was - I didn't even want them ironing! At the time I was riding my bicycle to work every day, with said shirts folded in the pannier bag, and by the time I got to work and was dressed for work, it may as well have not been ironed at all. I did tell her this and she kept doing it anyway, insisting that she was just helping me be more presentable at work but, I genuinely would rather she just ditch this task and spend time doing something she wanted to do instead. In the end it became a moot point because after COVID, dress code at my work disappeared overnight so it's pretty rare that I wear a shirt anyway (feel free to agree or disagree on whether or not shirts absolutely should be ironed - the frustrating thing for me was not having a say in the matter)

Bins. Emptying the bins is my job and always has been, and obviously I occasionally forget, but over the years what this resulted in was - the vast majority of the time, I do remember to put the bins out - but, she still reminded me, just in case. Which I didn't have any issue with as long as she was just trying to be helpful, but what it also meant was that whenever an argument came up, she'd say "you can't even put the bins out without being reminded". Ultimately I don't want her to decide "he's clearly incapable of doing this so I need to make sure the thing gets done" - taking responsibility for the bins, to me means taking responsibility for the consequences if they don't get done. Maybe the bins are full and I'll need to actually take rubbish (trash for you in the US lol) to the tip (dump?) until the bins do get emptied again. I'm happy to accept that as a consequence, as it's a direct consequence of where I failed to do something, whereas I don't want her to decide that yet another thing needs her involvement because it absolutely has to work perfectly. (We've made some progress on this - I have a google calendar reminder to do the bins, that I set up - on the agreement that this is my reminder and she doesn't need to do this any more)

Anyway - if this was just limited to our marriage it'd be one thing. I'd still want her to give herself a bit of a break but it's also:

- people at her work have downright unreasonable expectations of her but she does way more than she could be expected to anyway because she has to "keep the peace"

- someone in her family asks her to do something that she really doesn't have time to do (and I expect if she just tells them this they will accept it and go elsewhere) but she fits it in anyway

- we're on various rotas at church and every so often someone can't do what they're supposed to be doing, and she almost always ends up covering because no one else offers at first

And other examples I'm sure

My wife is amazing and I do appreciate everything she does but it's too much for her. She has this attitude of "if I don't do it no one will" - is it terrible that I just want her to "let the **** hit the fan" (I'm not sure what your swearing policy is here lol) every so often, just to see how bad it really is? Sometimes to see if that thing really needed to be done at all, but other times so people can actually spot that there's a problem and she doesn't just bail them out all the time. I do know that my ADHD causes it's own issues in our marriage but this kind of feels like a separate issue to me, even though evidently it kind of feeds into the ADHD issues and how she deals with them