I just found this great site and it seems so helpfull that I decided to share my own experience, to vent, to get a second opinion and yes, maybe some sympathy too. 

Compromising between for example the zoo or the beach is a realistic task.  But is there any compromising between decent and disgusting table manners?

My SO is an ADD man, and I am the non-ADD woman.
In short:  We are both nearing the age of sixty, we both are not working anymore. We both have a university degree. I am European, and English is not my first language. Also he has more of a working class background, while mine is educated middle class.
We got into contact over the internet, and spent several month with an intensive and extensive e-mail and telephone contact, before we met. During this time, he seemed a dream come true, because we seemed to have so much in common, to share so many values and attitudes.
When we actually met, everything changed. 
We are together right now, but if we are not getting married, we have a lot of trouble to be able to be together all the time in one of our two countries. So he wants us to get married, but I have become such a wreck from being the target of his inacceptable behaviours, that I feel I should run. We can stay together for another 5 month, then decision time comes. 

He has no official diagnosis of ADD, he has been misdiagnosed and given anti-psychotic medication for a while, but luckily he is off that by now. One doctor told him, that he has ADD, on a computer test he also was ADD, and he has so many of the typical symptoms, that I have no doubt about it. He denies it, my mentioning ADD causes anger, and he interpretes all my reactions to his behaviours as an indication that there were something wrong with me, not with him. He demands me to change my attitude and to lighten up.

When we met personally, I started to experience on a daily basis unpleasant emotions until I was burned out. That feeling of being burned out has already been discribed in other postings much better than I can do it.
I have gone through it all, pain, frustration, repulsion, humiliation, stress, embarrassment, until by now I have lost all my calm, composure and countenance and I am loosing my temper at every unpleasant incident. 

Apparently, we have different standards of what we consider as appropriate and normal in things, that we never talked of while on the phone.

I need some feedback: Can he really demand or expect me to compromise with his behaviour, which is so far off from what I consider civilized, or do I better acknowledge, that the differences are too big, and there is no future?

In the first weeks of being together, I found out:
He did not change his underwear or T-shirt for days but slept in the same he wore during the day.
He sometimes did not take a shower for days.
He did not use sheets on the bed.
He did not lift the toilet seat while doing his business standing. The seat had gone ugly and needed to be replaced.
He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his robe.
He shoved food upon his fork with the finger on his plate and then moved the unwiped hand down upon his lap.
He used his paper napkin to wipe his placemat and afterwards used the same with his mouth.
He shoved crumbs (and other debris) from the table into his hand and then put it upon his plate, before he had finished eating from it.
He did not wash any fruit or vegetables before cooking or eating.
I use the past tense, but sometimes he still relapses into doing some of those things.

I was shocked, it had been beyond my imagination, that an educated person could have such manners. I told him bluntly, that such behaviour disturbed me. Reluctantly, he tried to improve. But I could not convince him, that he needed higher standards of manners for his own sake, and that he was responsible for this. Instead, he attempted to change his manners just to please me, or even just to avoid my reactions. Such an extrinsic motivation was of course not strong enough for any progress without collateral damage. Instead the spiral of deterioration began.
When for example he wiped his nose on his sleeve the first time, I told him calmly, that I considered this as inappropriate behaviour and I wanted to convince him of this. But on every new occasion, I got more drastic, and after a few repetitions, I was cringing with disgust, and yes, at some times, I called him a pig, because that is my true opinion of such manners. I got frustrated, that no matter, how drastic I was, it did not motivate him to stop. He got angry and aggressive, because I nagged him for what he considered trivialities.
Who has to yield, do I have to allow him the ADD's license, am I obliged to sit at the table and feel repulsed or is it his obligation to spare me the disgust of his manners, or do we better stop sitting at the same table? Personally, I think that sparing the other the feeling of disgust is part of caring.

I am fully aware that pointing out to someone his bad manners is a way of making him feel bad, and my role in a relationhip is also to spare this to him and to make him feel good. But how can someone change his manners, when he has no glimpse of how his behaviour sometimes is embarrassing and disgusting, to me and in public?


This is just the beginning, there has happened so much more, of which I would like so much to know, how much of my consternation and outrage about it is justified. But this post has already gotten very long, so I might continue later.

I am totally shocked right now, because last night I discovered that my husband has been engaging in chat room sex with at least one man.  He has apologized and says it hasn't happened that often, but I'm not sure I believe him.  He also blames me for criticizing him so much that he no longer finds me sexually attractive.  We've had a troubled sex life for years, with my husband unable to achieve or maintain an erection.  I've always attributed it to our strained relationship and the fact that I assumed he masturbated frequently and had gotten used to a different type of stimulation.  I never would have imagined he would have anonymous sex online.

I'm sure my husband has ADHD.  He was diagnosed as a child and the doctor prescribed medication, but his mother felt wrong giving it to him. When he cried and begged her not to, she dumped the pills down the drain.  What followed was years of trouble in school, including years of special ed.  He went on to earn two degrees from good universities, but with very poor grades.  At one point he did so poorly he lost his scholarship and had to join the military to afford to finish his undergraduate degree.  He has had multiple conflicts with bosses and has been fired twice from his civilian jobs.  He is under-achieving at best for his intelligence level.  He loses things all the time.  He seems like he isn't paying attention frequently.  He can't budget time or money, and we're in deep credit card debt.  He acts inappropriately in small, embarrassing ways, like taking huge bites of food then chewing loudly and talking with his mouthful at parties.  He will not admit that he has ADHD, only sometimes admitting to what he calls his "challenges" or his "issues."

Our son was diagnosed with ADHD at around 9, and he made wonderful progress on the Dore program.  He is now in high school earning good grades, doing well in sports, and maintaining friendships.  I want the same help for my husband, but now that Dore is available in only a limited way, and with our debt we can't afford it anyway, I want him to commit to Learning Breakthrough. 

I feel totally hopeless.  I am so sick of living with him and dealing with all his problems--messiness, failure to follow through, lack of control in spending.  And now this--homosexual cyber sex.  If it weren't for our three beautiful children, I would leave him.  At one time I loved him, but ADHD has killed those feelings.  Does anyone have any advice??  Does this sound like impulsivity or sex addition, or do you think he's really gay??

My marriage has been a minefield--full of surpising, crushing disappointments that have seemed to come out of the blue-- since day one, and it is only 12 years into it that I finally understand that my husband has ADHD. It's a giant AHA!-- like someone rang a giant gong that made some sense of my world! Raised in a family in which I was isolated as a child, I must have normalized all the feelings of abandonment and worthlessness and rage that have come tumbling down on me in this marriage...

Our daughter has ADD, and in exploring that our doctor asked which parent might have it. I was shocked and saddened and ultimately (to my shame!) delighted to know that my husband's ways had a name, a description-- that he wasn't ignoring me because I was unlovable, but because he truly can't pay attention to anything (except his endless and impenetrable spreadsheets)! It's kind of a revelation! My head is spinning.

Here are two events that I can now revise: on our honeymoon, in romantic, gorgeous, sensuous Bali, I woke each morning to an empty bed. My husband, who cannot sleep past 5 am, was out exploring. I passed the morning hours crying, reading, or talking with the hotel staff or other guests while I waited for him. I thought he was unhappy with me, that he was running from our brand-new marriage, and I was almost ready to accept an end to it. When he returned, always happy and clueless and cuddly as a puppy, I was at a loss for words, not wanting to fight but waiting for a new understanding... Later that year, I took a pregnancy test. We both longed for a baby. He stood with me during the wildly suspenseful moment when I peed on the stick. Then the phone rang. It was his beloved sister calling. He took the phone into the bedroom, stretched out on the bed, and had a good long chat with her, while I waited for the results of the test alone in the bathroom. I was pregnant, but had no one to share it with. He was hyperfocused on the conversation he was having--not apathetic about our new life.

Maybe now I can see that his continued declarations of love and admiration, and his intermittent acts of devotion, however misguided (like giving me a tv adapter for my birthday, when I truly hate tv and never watch it), come from a real place, and maybe I can find a way to hear that message over all the noise of his inattentiveness. Maybe I can learn the special language of ADHD; maybe this diagnosis is like my new translator. Maybe (I sincerely hope!) I can start to feel loved and stop being the screaming, raging, guilty, uncomprehending stressball I have become in recent years, feeling like the only solid ground in our family and overburdened by having to manage everything for everyone. Maybe. I'm hoping... It's all pretty new. I'll keep tuned in to this site.

Good day, everyone,

Thanks for providing a place to read and talk about these issues. My husband and I will have been married 5 years next Friday. The problems with his ADHD are just becoming more acute, however. I am trying to turn things around so we can make some progress.

I work from home; I have a well-paying job, while we live in a low cost-of-living area. My husband currently does not work, though we are trying to find him a job. We are presently living with his parents and younger brother and sister (we pay 1/3rd of the utilities and I cook and do all the shopping, as compensation). We are doing this in order to get out of debt, which for the most part means his $50,000+ student loans. Both of us are in agreement about our end goals of having me stay home with the children and homeschool them (2.5 yo and a 3 mo).

My husband is very willing to get a job, but doesn't feel confident that he ever will. This keeps him from applying to many places. He also doesn't want to apply for a 'lower' type job because he sees that as confirmation that he can't get anything better. There are positions he could be applying for but he's not, mainly because I don't want to do the work for him. He complains that the jobs he has had have come about as a result of me and he wouldn't have been hired on his own (one job at a theatre we both interviewed together; he feels it was my interviewing skills which impressed the manager but he was the one with more flexible hours...the other is when he replaced me at my position during my first maternity leave). This makes me even more loathe to do the work in applying for jobs for him, since when he gets a position he'll see it as more confirmation that he can't get a job on his own. And yet I want to balance that with providing my services in areas which are my strengths (I do write a mean cover letter and can negotiate a lot of this stuff). Then there's at least one of the largest companies in town he doesn't want to apply to because they don't inspire confidence, having let go a friend we know (they do have open positions for which I feel he'd be qualified). We live in a small town (about 10,000 people), so opportunities are limited here. We live about an hour away from two big cities which would have a lot more opportunities. However, he does not want to move for a job (and that would seem to move us backward from our goal of getting debt free...paying for housing -and- childcare).

We have tried a bit of counseling but nothing really came of it. I felt like he and the counselor just chatted about inconsequential things (movies, etc), such that I could not contentedly attend the sessions anymore. The very last time we went he felt so defensive at the topics I brought up that he refused to go the next time. We did see a psychologist this spring who started to work on his meds; we have not yet gone back to him but I am thinking I'm going to press for an appointment with him. That dr. made the point that we couldn't do anything until medication was in my husband (he's been unmedicated most of our marriage). That was 3-4 months ago, and we've finally just gotten to the point where my husband needed a refill, so he's obviously not taking his medicine on a regular basis.

Tomorrow we should be getting results from sleep apnea tests--I had insisted on those because he says he's always tired. He can wake up in the morning still utterly exhausted, lethargic, needing to take naps, etc. Which is frustrating as all heck. I really don't want to think of him as lazy, so I'm hoping it is something physical like that. And I know that ADD people are often suspected of being lazy, unfairly.

I guess I feel like there's no one who is able to help us. And if we're on our own I have to think of our options (my husband when asked to help solve the problem just says he doesn't know), and none of them seem pleasant.

I truly love my husband and enjoy being around him. If we were independently wealthy I don't think there would be any problem at all :-D But seeing as that's not the case....

Thanks for listening.

-Misty