ADHD After Dark

Better Sex Life, Better Relationship

Ari Tuckman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000084702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This pioneering book explores the impact of ADHD on a couple's sex life and relationship. It explains how a better sex life will benefit your relationship (and vice versa) and why that's especially important for couples with one partner with ADHD.

Grounded in innovative research, ADHD After Dark draws on data from a survey of over 3000 adults in a couple where one partner has ADHD. Written from the author's unique perspective as both an expert in ADHD and a certified sex therapist, the book describes the many effects of ADHD on couples' sex lives and happiness, covering areas such as negotiating sexual differences, performance problems, low desire, porn, making time for sex, infidelity, and more. The book outlines key principles for a great sex life for couples with ADHD and offers strategies and treatment interventions where specific issues arise.

Written in a readable and entertaining style, ADHD After Dark offers clear information on sexuality and relationships and is full of valuable advice on how to improve both. This guide will be an essential read for adults with ADHD, as well as their partners or spouses, and therapists who work with ADHD clients and couples.

Section II
Principles of Great Sex Lives

Introduction: Your Sex Life is Worth Working On

Given that this is about a quarter of the way through a book on sex, I am probably preaching to the choir here, but I firmly believe that your sex life is worth working on. Whether it’s good but you want it to be great, whether it ain’t what it used to be and you want to bring back its former glory, or whether it was always pretty flat-lined and you want to breathe new life into it, sex lives can almost always be improved.

It’s definitely possible to have a happy romantic relationship without any sex at all—it isn’t an absolute requirement. It’s also possible to have a happy romantic relationship with only occasional and/or so-so sex. However, sex therapist and researcher Barry McCarthy, PhD found that a good sex life adds about 20% to the happiness of a relationship (McCarthy & McCarthy, 2013). Adding that 20% won’t make it worth staying in an otherwise terrible relationship and taking it away probably won’t tip the scales on an otherwise great relationship. At the extremes, that 20% might be a rounding error. But for most of us, that 20% might make the difference between passing and failing, or at least between taping our report card to the fridge versus forging a parent’s signature.

Missing out on all or most of that 20% may also mean that we need to work a lot harder in the other parts of the relationship, since we’re starting the semester with an 80 before anything else has even happened. Whether your sex life adds 5%, 10%, or the full 20% to your and your partner’s relationship happiness, I want it to add as much as is reasonably possible.

Fortunately, sex involves individual and relationship skills that can be developed like any others. The chapters in this section will help you and your partner create that mutually desirable sex life. There won’t be any pictures or lists of the top ten positions for multiorgasmic meltdowns, but it will teach you most of what you need to know to work with your partner to make the bedroom a much more exciting place. Or to turn some other place into your bedroom. This will involve some basic facts on the mechanics of sex (e.g., why lube can be a great addition), but mostly will involve improving your relationship generally and also specifically as it impacts your sex life. Most of this will benefit you way beyond the bedroom.

What would make your sex life better for your partner?

My partner likes to stay in his comfort zone, so never having to accommodate my sensation-seeking would be better for him. I think our sex life would be better if he would care enough to read a book about sex.

ADHD woman, 27, dating, living separately, been together 6–10 years

5
Sex Makes You a Better Person

Really? Sex makes you a better person?

Absolutely. Keeping sex great over the years and decades with the same person will indeed involve the kind of personal and relationship growth that can’t help but make both of you better people overall.

To have a consistently good sex life, you need to behave well before, during, and after sex and you need to work well with your partner on all sorts of things that have nothing to do with sex. This process has great rewards, but can be a lot of work, especially as the relationship deepens, gets more complicated, and stretches over the decades. The couples who are the happiest through this process are the ones who hold themselves and their partners to high but reasonable standards and strive for self-growth. They take personal responsibility and challenge themselves to work on their issues. This makes them better partners, but also indirectly pushes their partner to also bring their best and become a better person and partner. This might mean working on their own or their partner’s ADHD, but it also involves everything else that the couple might be struggling with.

What would make your sex life better for you?

If we had good communication and a deep, intimate relationship, sex would be much more enjoyable for me and less of a chore. If I felt truly seen … truly understood … and truly prioritized, I would feel more free to let go and enjoy sex, and see it as an important part of our relationship.

Non-ADHD woman, 42, married, 6–10 years

This process of individual and shared growth enables them to keep their sex life vibrant. For most people, a better sex life isn’t the only, or even primary, motivator for this difficult work, but it’s hard to keep your sex life humming along without doing this work. This is why I say that sex makes you a better person—it’s yet another motivator to do that other personal and relationship work that is a prerequisite for a great sex life. And because sexuality can feel like such a sensitive and vulnerable topic, it takes some great communication and relationship skills to find ways to negotiate the two partners’ differences and create a great sex life that meets both of their needs. So, sexuality is both a powerful motivator and also a great testing ground for those important skills that will benefit all other parts of the relationship. Even if we just want to get laid, there is so much more going on there when it happens in committed relationships.

What would make your sex life better for you?

Sex would better for me if I could relax enough to allow myself to enjoy what my partner does. If it’s not the perfect touch, at the perfect time, in the perfect way… . I tend to dwell on the negative versus enjoying the positive. Maybe that’s not an ADHD thing, but I can’t help thinking that “normal people” would be able to do it better. Essentially, I’m so aware of being different, that the way I respond to anything my hubby does MUST be abnormal.

ADHD woman, 44, married, been together 21+ years

Peace Sometimes Requires War

Early in most relationships, everyone is polite, interested, and focused on what they like about each other, so there are few fights. Nobody is making excessive demands and both partners try to be considerate of each other. In the survey, the vast majority of respondents were quite happy with their relationship and sex life in the first year. These are fun and usually easy times. Unfortunately, this peace is partially maintained by avoiding too much honesty and disclosure, as partners feel each other out and see what the other can handle.

As the partners’ differences begin to emerge and become more noticeable, a more complete picture of the other person is revealed and we don’t like everything that we see. Of course, we all have things about ourselves that we wish were different, so we shouldn’t expect our partner to be more perfect than we ourselves are. Not only do we begin to see more of the differences between us, warts and all, but it also matters a lot more now that the relationship has become more important. Acquaintances don’t bother us as much because what they do and who they are doesn’t have as much of a direct impact on our life and happiness. With a committed partner, we’re caught between being bothered by their shortcomings and therefore want to push them to work on them, but we also don’t want to lose this important person from our lives so we may be inclined to try to ignore the problems. Damn, that’s a tough dilemma.

Sometimes these increasingly obvious differences between partners feel insurmountable and the relationship ends, which may be for the best—hopefully both partners learned some good lessons about themselves and relationships and go on to find a better match next time.

Even when the couple stays together, this process of disillusionment is normal, inevitable, and ultimately a good thing if the couple is able to hold onto each other’s positive qualities while tolerating the less desirable ones as they work through the struggles that evolving relationships bring. Even when partners are really similar in all the important ways, they won’t want all the same things at all the same times. This is probably the time that ADHD symptoms become more obvious or when they are no longer written off as interesting quirks. This is also the time when the non-ADHD partner’s less productive attempts to deal with those symptoms become more noticeable (i.e., annoying). So the tug of war begins: “stop telling me what to do!” versus “stop doing those things that make me angry!”.

The big three argument topics for most couples are sex, money, and parenting, all of which can be impacted by ADHD. These topics are hardest because we tend to care much more about the outcome of a disagreement when one of these is center stage, unlike discussions about what to have for dinner. In addition, these big three tend to have mutually exclusive options—sex usually requires a personal involvement from both partners, a dollar can’t be spent twice, and partners need to make at least generally compatible parenting decisions. It’s easier to take one for the team on other topics or to come up with an easy compromise that everyone can be happy enough about (“OK, we can watch my movie next time.”).

It’s these less obviously solvable impasses that require more nuanced discussions and sophisticated negotiations to come to a sustainable agreement. This requires reflection to figure out what you want and why, empathy to understand your partner’s position, and probably some good self-soothing for when things get heated. The best solutions are probably not simply a 50/50 split down the middle where each partner is half unhappy; rather, find those deeper solutions that both people can feel even better about. This isn’t kid stuff and isn’t for the faint of heart. It requires solid self-awareness and negotiation skills and a genuine desire to create a solution that you can both be happy with.

It can be even harder to work on the big three when too much of your time, energy, and good will toward each other are constantly chewed away by the little million—all those mundane matters of daily life, like cleaning up leaked toothpaste from the bathroom counter (and arguing about who left the cap off). Even if you lived by yourself, you would still have to deal with all these boring details of life, but when you live with someone else it adds an extra element of disagreement about which options are higher or lower priority: is organic milk worth the extra cost? Is it more important to load the dishwasher or wipe off the counters? Does it matter if shoes are left in the living room? Few of these are questions with factual answers, but rather are about personal preference (and possible value judgments, such as that only degenerates don’t understand why doilies are what separates society from chaos).

The non-ADHD person really needs to move beyond taking anything personally and really just go with the flow. (However, don’t compromise your self-respect and values. Don’t put your self-esteem into the hands of your partner.)

Non-ADHD woman, 35, married, been together 6–10 years

It’s probably safe to say that couples where one partner has ADHD are more likely than the neighbors to have more of these sorts of disagreements. Sometimes the person with ADHD genuinely has a different opinion than their partner, but sometimes they may agree (e.g., “of course it’s a good idea to pay bills on time”) but have trouble executing consistently. If these slips evoke strong reactions from their partner, then they may dig in as a means of self-defense (“it’s only a twenty-dollar late fee, chill out!”). Hopefully no one is such a fragile flower that one of these arguments breaks the relationship bank, but constant skirmishes can trickle away positive feelings and put both partners on guard against the next disappointment. This becomes even more complicated when deeper psychological meaning is read into these events (“if you loved me more, you would just pay them on time” and “if you loved me more, you wouldn’t constantly criticize me”). It’s death by a thousand cuts—forget about getting around to addressing those bigger, existential, relationship issues.

Fortunately, the process of hashing through disagreements with our partner is the best education in these important life skills, even if it can often feel like trial by fire. When we first start dating as a teen or young adult, we’re all pretty clueless, but the lessons begin the very first time there is a whiff of disagreement. Yay, learning! As with most learning curves, there are a bunch of failed tests and missing homework, but little by little we figure out how to do relationships better. Some people are quick studies, perhaps because they had skilled role models, whereas others really struggle to make progress or get stuck in old behaviors that perhaps never worked that well even in the beginning.

As much as a committed relationship can feel like a windowless prison in those dark moments, it can also be the pressure chamber where a lump of coal becomes a diamond. Committed relationships are harder to walk away from, so we are forced to address disagreements or remain unhappy. Doing that hard work of addressing the disagreement in a new and more productive way can feel almost impossible, but remaining stuck feels totally unacceptable, so we’re really caught in between. As empowering as it can feel to stubbornly dig in and hold our ground, eventually most people decide that there has to be a better way. They realize that there may be more happiness to be found in changing what they themselves do, rather than holding out hope that their partner will finally make all the necessary changes. As much as these impasses can bring out the worst in each of us (and they do), they can also bring out our best—usually after we finally get sick enough of the worst.

If ADHD is part of the mix in your relationship, then getting that figured out and addressed probably makes it easier to work on the rest of your relationship. It’s probably reasonable for the non-ADHD partner to expect that their partner with ADHD will take it seriously and actively work on it, especially on the ways that impact the relationship. Meanwhile, it is probably also reasonable for the ADHD partner to expect their partner to also educate themselves about ADHD, give credit for good effort, and not expect perfection (defined as the non-ADHD partner’s way of doing things). There is plenty more to relationship bliss than managing ADHD, but it is definitely a good step in the right direction—relationships are hard enough without adding that fuel to the fire.

Sometimes ADHD becomes the convenient excuse to not deal with these other personal or relationship problems—e.g., “How can we work on these other issues when your ADHD/your constant criticism of my ADHD is causing so many other problems?” There may be some truth to this in that ADHD is at least a partial cause of lots of fights, but it isn’t the only thing going on there. No relationship is so simple that a disagreement is about just one thing, so what else isn’t being addressed there? What’s the history that is coloring how you each respond to the situation of the moment?

Of course, this avoidance move isn’t unique to ADHD. Couples can also get stuck in other topics, like money, and therefore not have to deal with what else is also going on in the relationship or in the deeper issues that underlie that topic. Or we can justify avoiding difficult conversations by being too busy to have the necessary time and energy. It can feel easy to justify this when work and parenting obligations really don’t leave much time for anything else. It’s easy to just keep chugging along, day after day, without really working on the relationship. Quality time together, sexual or otherwise, just seems to not happen often enough, even if no one has an outright agenda to avoid it.

Whether subconsciously or intentionally, all of this makes it easier to avoid having these difficult conversations. This then is the challenge: to push ourselves to carve out the time and energy to have difficult conversations about messy topics. That’s a tough sales pitch, except that it’s the only way that things really get better and it’s worth it if you can get there. As much as I can look back over the twenty years of my relationship and wish that both of us had done a lot of things differently (as in, way better), I also know that things wouldn’t be better now in our sex life and relationship overall if we hadn’t slogged through some of those bad times.

Happy Couples Fight Better

Disagreements are inevitable in relationships, whether romantic, friends, coworkers, roommates, etc. Two people won’t always want the same things at the same times. Happy couples don’t necessarily have fewer disagreements, they’re just better at handling the disagreements that do arise. To do this, they use the three rules of fighting better.

First, they fight respectfully. This means no low blows, saying things that they later regret, or winning at too high a cost. They ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Good Sex is Extra Important for Couples With ADHD
• Section I The Lay of the Land: Research Results
• Section II Principles of Great Sex Lives
• Section III Overcome Specific Issues
• Appendix A: The ADHD Relationship Sex Survey
• Appendix B: Provider Directories
• Appendix C: Recommended Reading
• Literature Cited
• Index