I wanted to share a success story about my marriage 🙂
My husband and I have had our ups and downs over the years. Some of our problems have been recurring and couples therapy helped some. A recurring issue was my husband playing a lot of video games and me feeling alone/neglected. My husband felt like things were great and I felt totally unseen, lonely, and forgotten about. I would ask him to connect or go on dates but he would shut down any idea that didn’t involve his niche hobbies. (Hobbies I have no interest in.) I used to really resonate with TikTok’s about how “if husbands wanted to they would.”
My personal therapist and I suspected I may have autism, so my husband and I found a neurodivergent-affirming couples therapist. In the first session we shared what was going on for about 5-10 minutes and she said, “This is a really common dynamic when the husband has ADHD and the wife has autism.” She started teaching us how to work with our brains instead of against them. Our marriage is in a much better place now. I wish all our previous couples therapists could have recognized the root cause years earlier!
What worked for us:
– found our husband has ADHD
– found out I have autism
– found out I’m chronically ill and it affects my libido
Other things we’ve done that have help a lot:
– assign regular tasks to each person ahead of time. That way when he forgets to take the trash out, I can just remind him and he does it – no fighting – because we agreed ahead of time that he was in charge of that task
– decide we’re only responsible for what we say out loud – mind reading is not expected.