My Husband & I Have Different Kinds Of ADHD. Here's How We Make It Work.

It’s 11 a.m. on a Saturday morning and I have a growing to-do list. Not a mental one, but an actual list on my phone of all the things that need to get done today: organize the garage, clean the baseboards, return that belt sander to Lowe’s before the window closes, declutter closets and drop old clothes at the local thrift, refinish the dresser for my office. I’ve been up for a few hours already, so the projects are in various states of start.

My husband is sitting in his favorite chair in the living room, nursing a cup of coffee while he “takes a minute.” Half an hour passes, then an hour, and before we know it, it’s 1 p.m. and he’s still there, phone in hand, deep in a game I couldn’t even explain if my life depended on it. It’s not that he’s ignoring me or trying to make some point. He has literally just lost the thread of time.

This used to be the point that I’d start to boil. Turning my irritation over and over in my head every time I passed by him on his restful perch while I continued to dart around from project to project.

In my worst moments, I’d let myself think the L-word: Lazy.

Only, he isn’t lazy. He’s never been lazy. Not even a little. From decorated service in the military to becoming a firefighter, then a fire marshal, then going back to school to get a degree in his chosen field, where he still works today, he has excelled in his career. He works incredibly hard at his job. I don’t think anyone who has ever worked with him would use the L-word to describe him.

Then, we learned he has ADHD. Several years later, we discovered I do, too. And so many of the things I thought I was looking at turned out to be something else entirely.

Two Different Types of ADHD Under One Roof

He has inattentive type. I have combined type, leaning harder into the hyperactive-impulsive end of the spectrum. Same disorder, yet manifesting in completely different ways.

What I finally understood about him is that focusing all day at work takes everything he’s got. By the time he walks in the door at home, the mental scaffolding he’s been building to hold everything up comes down. Home is a low-stakes environment, so there’s no external pressure helping to hold the structure of that mental scaffolding in place. Instead of a big list of tasks reading to him as “the job,” it reads as a wall. A wall that he hits and literally cannot see his way around.

So when he sits down for a break, the part of the brain that would normally say “OK, time to get back up” simply doesn’t fire. This, as we’ve come to learn, is known as executive dysfunction and is a core feature of ADHD. It can feel especially pronounced in someone with inattentive presentation (like him).

It was a light bulb moment for me. It’s a symptom. Not a flaw. Not laziness. It’s part of the way his brain is wired.

Learning about my own type changed things for me, too. I’ve always kind of looked at my go-go-go nature as a virtue. Look how much I get done! Look how persistent I am! Even when a tiny voice in the back of my brain would tell me, Hey, you should ease up; your body and your brain need rest.

The “drive” I feel can also be characterized as “restlessness,” and it’s not always healthy. I push too hard and overcommit. I’ll start a project at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night because not filling the time with something productive feels physically unbearable to me, and then suffer through feeling fried all day Monday.

My therapist once told me, “Don’t mistake motion for meaning.” And once I truly grasped that, it helped me reframe how my husband and I go about getting sh*t done.

What Actually Works for Us

The biggest thing, which you could contend should be the practice in any relationship, is that we play to our strengths. And while designating tasks based on who’s better at them might sound obvious to you, it took me a long time to stop feeling like we should assign things based on some idea of who should be able to do them.

Another breakthrough for us has been body doubling, which, again, is almost stupidly simple. What we have learned is that if my husband sticks with me, he doesn’t get bogged down. He’s happy to truck along beside me, getting things done. In the past, we’d run into problems when I’d try to divide and conquer: “You work on this downstairs, and I’ll work on another thing upstairs.”

But out of sight is very much out of mind for him, so we started body doubling as a sort of buddy system. Every job we do isn’t necessarily a two-person job, but it’s a two-person job for us. A lovely little bonus to this is that we end up spending a lot more time together. Some of my favorite Saturdays now are just the two of us puttering around together.

A tougher pill to swallow, but one that has been necessary, is accepting that we can’t (and shouldn’t) do it all. There are some things we both struggle with, and me trying to drag both of us through those tasks just wasn’t it. So now we outsource what neither of us can hang with. No more waiting for the grass in the backyard to get knee-high because neither of us wants to mow it; we just got a f*cking landscaper.

Similarly, if we can automate something, we automate it.

Another tough one: letting “good enough” be good enough. Perfectionism and ADHD are unfortunate companions, and this is a constant struggle for me. I used to redo things my husband had already done, which insulted him and exhausted me. And it made both of us feel like the standard was unreachable, which for my husband triggered that “why start?” executive dysfunction.

If it’s getting done, it’s getting done… and that’s a win.

Finally, we talk about it when we feel like there’s an imbalance that does need to be addressed. As the mom, I’m already the default parent. And because of my hyperactive ADHD tendencies to go–go-go, I always tend to be the default doer. The default laundry wrangler. The default kitchen tidier.

Instead of stewing on things internally and expecting him to figure out why I’m frustrated, I just say it. I don’t blow up; I simply let my husband know, Hey, this is a lot right now, and I need you to take some of it. And he makes a real, conscious effort to pick it up, because he really does want to. He’s always ready and willing to course-correct, and feels genuinely bad when he realizes the invisible load has tipped too far toward me.

I used to feel guilty about saying anything. That’s partially on societal conditioning. But it’s also because we have a great marriage and he is a great man… maybe this is just one way we’re not compatible among the many, many ways we are. Would that be so bad?

I’ve since come to realize we’re being pointed in opposite directions by the same thing. In a weird way, it almost makes us make even more sense. Of course we’re cut from the same cloth, albeit different patterns. And most Saturdays now, we manage both of our needs.

The garage, for the record, is still not done.