My boyfriend has ADD and it drives me insane. (man, loving, kid)
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Ritalin is methylphenidate, an amphetamine or upper. It shouldn't have made you feel like a zombie--that would be a depressant.
Soldiers on amphetamines? No thank you.
I can only describe how it made me feel. And it literally sucks happiness out of your body. I felt numb, irritable, and aggressive; a weird combination.
You know what took care of my problems in school? High school. If you goof off in class...you don't play Friday night. I got busted for making some jokes in Freshman English...had to sit out...and that was the end of it.
i wish there were some solutions to managing his ADD but it seems whatever solutions he arrives at never sticks. he used to do meth, saying that it helped him concentrate, and i threatened to leave him- in fact, did leave him, and then he quit. he hasn't done it for something like 8 months. and i am positive of this, because i could always tell by a myriad of physical signs (including his taste). i was just sort of hoping to get some coping mechs from people who have experienced this, not "he's a douche leave him". tho i admit that today before he left for work we got into another argument- and he has been sick lately, and he is such a freaking whiny baby when he is sick, i mean, its like something out of a sitcom, like he should be wearing a diaper. seriously. its like "this blanket is too cold" or "my eyelashes hurt". he didn't actually say these things but i am just giving ridiculous, comparable examples.
Try Gingko. If he wants to put Big Pharma in him, that is up to him.
Help him get organized. With all the tech apps on your phone...it's kind of fun.
Help him get more exercise.
Help him to quit eating junk food.
Didn't you say you are super organized? That's going to be an uphill battle for you two. I can get along with super organized people...as long as they give me leeway to do things the way I want. Maybe he's the same...do you care how he gets things done, or if?
For example the way I clean up is probably crazy to most people. I'll vacuum a room here, clean a toilet there....chaos...until at the end it is all done.
actually jsizzle, that is how he does it as well, does a bit here and there and then its done. i do the same, but only much more thorough. like, he might wipe off the faucet but wont scrub the sink. whereas i will scrub the sink.
i often wonder if some things can be accounted for by a difference between men and women. the older i get the more i see that a general rule of thumb is that women see things from the bottom up, and men see them from the top down. i can't imagine cleaning a room without vaccuuming. men that i have known will start from the top, the most obvious messiness, but not clean UNDER things. does this make sense?
i have tried to get him to quit eating junk food, but he always moans about me preaching to him. really, when i lay it all out i wonder why i am wasting my time. he is a lovely guy, that doesn't mean i can spend the rest of my life with him.
hi everyone, i haven't posted on the relationship are of this forum before but i am interested in people's opinions/experiences with this (if any) as it is getting really tough to deal with.
ok, my boyfriend. he is a lovely guy. very family oriented, hardworking, affectionate, disease free, not a drug addict- these are all pluses if you live in LA!
but he has ADD, and i am sure has had it his entire life. we have been together for over a year, but it is getting really tough to reconcile myself to the idea of being with him for the rest of my life.
whenever we argue, he will forget what he said about five minutes before. the most horrible things come out of his mouth and then five minutes later he swears he didn't say it. i truly don't know if this is by design on his part, or a symptom of his ADD.
then there is the "piles". i had another boyfriend years ago who had ADD, and they BOTH had this tendency to put stuff in piles, and it drives me batty. i am a pretty anal broad, and i believe in a place for everything and everything in its place. i am constantly trying to get him organized, and his version is just "piles"...piles of bills, piles of papers with no real order to them, and it would be one thing if this were a help to him, a sort of self-structuring mechanism- but it isn't. it drives him insane as well, but it still happens.
time management is another, HUGE issue. he is late for everything and always has unrealistic expectations about how much time something will take. 15 minutes to get from silverlake to west adams on a friday in rush hour traffic? not gonna happen, but he makes this assumption regularly, at the expense of the goodwill of the people he works for.
he has many fantastic ideas, but no follow through. he is constantly starting things and leaving them midstream all over the place, in again, PILES.
he will walk across the room to get a tool or to address something else, and will be waylaid by one of his other projects and then forget what he was doing.
he shuns the idea of medication, and so do i- and i wonder if the problem isn't in my perception of things. perhaps i am too rigid, and he is too lax, and there might be a happy medium in there for us if we could find it.
but our communication problems constantly drive a wedge between us. we have broken up numerous times- but like i said, he really is a lovely guy, and i love him very much, but it is getting very monotonous. i can't imagine having a child with someone who forgets what he is doing as he is walking across the room.
anyone else out there have any experience with a spouse and ADD? any sort of advice would be appreciated.
Hi. I am an adult woman with ADHD and I can't understand why your boyfriend is not being treated with medications. It helped change my life! Taking meds literally helped turn me into a different person. I still have all of the ADHD bad habits, they are just not as extreme as they were before. Also, reading everything I could find on ADHD helped me manage my own behavior too. I am educated at the graduated level, married, have a child and lead a wonderful life. He can too. He just has to invest in managing and treating the disorder.
yes, he was diagnosed when he was in school, for what that's worth, even tho that was a few years ago.
it is very frustrating, all the more because i think that i may have had my own problems in the past with something like ADD, as strange as that might sound. i know i used to be extremely unfocused, and i empathize with him in that regard and it takes a super human effort for me to NOT be that way, which is why i think i am so ultra sensitive about it. i have had ADD (diagnosed) friends in the past say "the only one who didn't realize you had some ADD was yourself". so i take extra, extra efforts at staying focused and organized- in fact i hyperfocus. but again we ARE as one of the posters mentioned, getting into the realm of pop psychology.
i've been with nasty pigs, i don't think the problem is as simple as that. because he wants to change, but nothing sticks. i have read a book whose title escapes me about adults with ADD and it really really made so much of his behavior make sense, so......i don't know. it just seems a bit prejudicial and unfair to end a relationship over something the guy can't help, when he is other wise a quite wonderful person. even if he does say stupid things sometimes.
so he has add and yet neither you or him think he should be on meds...and you are here complaing about him?
I can relate to your frutration. My husband and two sons have ADD and none of them make piles or use abusive language.
Your boyfriend is just an abusive slob. My point is that ADD is not an excuse for bad behavior.
My guy's ADD manifests itself by not being able to retain information for very long. Like, I can't say "Go to the store and get carrots, celery and milk, then pick up the dry cleaning. They will not remember, so I'll need to repeat it a few times while they write it down and then, hopefully, they will not lose the list on the way to the store, or be distracted by a bright shiny object.
Another thing one of my sons does is to arrange his food before he starts eating. Like, if he gets a bucket of oysters, he'll shuck them all first before he begins to eat them. He was medicated until high school, which helped him focus on tests. He did not like the side effects so opted to discontinue.
I believe all three of them have successfully learned coping skills to deal with it. Interestingly, both my boys have excelled in the structure of the military.
Your boyfriend will always be like this, so get out now if you cannot tolerate it.
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