ADHD dating advice can make the difference between a lonely Saturday night and a night out on the town. As we have mentioned before, relationships can present challenges for individuals with ADHD. ADHD has an effect on marriages as well as friendships and dating relationships.
Good ADHD dating advice can really improve a night out on the town. Dating plays an important part in many people’s lives. If you’re not married, you more than likely find yourself involved in the dating scene whether you like it or not. If you have ADHD, you more than likely also find dating makes you anxious, nervous, and unsettled.
Meeting new people is hard. Many of us need help even just meeting someone to begin with. Trying to figure out if you want to date someone only complicates the matter further.
Then you need to add in trying to put on your best face and show off your nicest manners. Dating presents challenges outside of normal interactions. For this reason, you need to have as many tools at your disposal as you possibly can.
In this post, we want to go through some key ADHD dating advice to help anyone on his or her first date or twentieth date. Before your next night out, read through this list and try to put some of these into action. We think that you might notice a difference in how your potential date responds and improve your chances for a follow up date.
Keep Yourself Healthy First
Many times, we want to get lost in relationships. With new relationships in particular, we want to do everything and anything for the other person. There’s good reason for this. After all, focusing on your dating partner matters. Still, you cannot care for their needs at a detriment to your own health.
To start off our ADHD dating advice, we want to emphasize the importance of keeping yourself healthy first. New relationships and dating present challenges. With new relationships, we often change many parts of our regular routine to adapt to the other person.
Changing around your routine isn’t necessarily bad, and can oftentimes provide benefits. What you don’t want to do, though, is get rid of your routine altogether. Throwing out your routine altogether can lead to your ADHD symptoms getting out of control.
Keep a positive routine
Keeping yourself healthy means keeping a positive routine. You need barriers and structure in your life to help manage your ADHD. Don’t give up that structure.
If you fail to manage your health and ADHD symptoms, your relationship will suffer sooner or later. If you can’t care for yourself first, you won’t be able to care for your dating partner.
To avoid going off the rails, pay attention to your ADHD routine. You can change your schedule every now and then, but try to keep the main pieces in place as much as possible. If you miss the normal time you go to bed one night, make extra effort to get to bed at the regular time the next night.
Keep your diet and exercise routine
Also, don’t throw out your diet and exercise routine just because you have a new dating partner. With dating, you want to try new food and new restaurants. Unfortunately, eating out every night can wreak havoc on your diet. Before your next date, make a plan to stick to your diet and try to follow some advice such as from this article.
The point we want to make is don’t give up on the healthy aspects in your life. Enjoy dating, but also maintain your healthy diet, exercise, and regular routine.
Keep Using Your Medication
The worst thing you could do for your ADHD is stop taking your medication. When we have something that changes our routine, though, such as a new relationship, we tend to forget or intentionally stop taking our medication. To build a relationship, though, you need to keep your ADHD symptoms in check. This means not giving up your prescription.
This might be the best ADHD dating advice on this list, in fact. Routine, dieting, and exercise are important, but medication helps control your symptoms even when the other pieces fall out of sync.
Many people with ADHD, though, feel tempted to stop their medication for many different reasons. For instance, you might feel you can have more energy or excitement if you go off the medication. Alternatively, you might feel more relaxed or creative without medication. While these all might seem alluring at first, you don’t want to risk your overall health by giving up on medication altogether. Additionally, keep in mind that coming off medication quickly can lead to withdrawal symptoms.
Instead of getting away from your medication, we would recommend trying to stay with your normal medication routine. With this piece of the puzzle, you want to keep up both the dosage and timing of your medication. Your body already has become used to a specific routine. You have enough changes with a new dating relationship; don’t make changing medication another drastic change.
Be Honest from the Beginning
As we all know, honesty is the best policy. In particular, you need to be honest and tell the truth to build a lasting relationship. For ADHD dating advice, we recommend you start any new relationship with being honest. What we mean here in particular is telling your dating partner about your ADHD and symptoms.
We know that communicating that you have ADHD to someone you want to date can present challenges. You don’t know how they may react. You have fears that telling them might frighten them off. While we cannot predict how anyone might take the news about your ADHD, we still recommend you tell them.
If the relationship lasts for any amount of time, your dating partner will find out eventually. The last thing you want is for them to find out through conflict over some of your ADHD symptoms. Rather than wait for conflict to begin, start with clear and honest communication.
Tell your partner that you like them and that you want to be honest with them. Tell them about your ADHD symptoms. More than likely they will understand and will want to try to help you manage the symptoms. If you understandably don’t know where to begin, try some of the advice for talking about health issues found at this link.
Set a Reminder for your Date Plans
Nothing communicates that you don’t care more than not showing up for your date on time. Unfortunately, forgetfulness and missing appointments tend to make the list of common traits for ADHD. To add to your list of ADHD dating advice, you need to include setting a reminder for your date plans.
If you find someone that you really like and want to spend time with, make sure you make showing up on a time a priority. You could say a thousand times that someone means something special to you, but always remember actions speak louder than words. In that vein, nothing speaks louder than how you honor and respect someone else’s time.
If you find that you struggle with remembering simple date plans, set a reminder so you don’t forget. For instance, put your date plans in your phone or email calendar as soon as you make them. This way, your phone will alert you as the time gets close.
Alternatively, set an alarm on your phone the morning of your date plans for half an hour before you need to leave. When the alarm goes off, start to get ready for your date and be sure to arrive on time. In general, if you struggle with ADHD and forgetfulness, try working on memory building techniques. The more you work at it, the less you will have to worry about forgetting.
Leave Early to Arrive on Time
This next part of ADHD dating advice follows along with setting a reminder. In addition to having a reminder, you also want to leave early for your date to be sure to arrive on time. The reasoning behind this advice again relies on the idea that you need to respect your date’s time.
Things happen that fall outside your control. A car crash might happen on your way to the restaurant. You might put in the wrong address and end up on the other side of the city. More likely, though, you might forget something at home and might have to go back. Similarly, you might get distracted by something when getting ready and leave late.
Take out the factors that you can’t control by leaving early. If you know you need to meet your date at 7:00 pm and it’s 15 mins away, leave at least 30 mins before when you need to arrive. You won’t remember the extra time later, and you will be glad that you got there early as opposed to late.
Accept your Weaknesses
We have covered ADHD weaknesses before. Part of the message that we want to convey here at FastBraiin is the understanding that we all have weaknesses. In order to get past our weaknesses, though, we need to accept them for what they are.
The reason that this falls under ADHD dating advice is that you can never accept someone else’s weaknesses if you can’t accept your own. We all have our own flaws. If you habitually only see others in the worst light, this undoubtedly will sink almost any new dating relationship you attempt.
Instead of looking for the flaws in others, recognize your own shortcomings and accept that we all fail sometimes. Sure, you don’t need to hang out and dwell in the areas that you struggle most with. You also don’t need to pretend like your weaknesses don’t exist. Accepting your weaknesses let’s you build on your strengths more and adapt to new situations.
Focus on Having Fun
New relationships and dating should involve having fun. Many times, we tend to put so much pressure on ourselves that we make ourselves too stressed to have fun. For some of the best ADHD dating advice, focus on having fun first and foremost.
Many people with ADHD tend to stress or over think things. Relationships present challenges and that’s before factoring in ADHD. Don’t let ADHD and stress overcome you, though. Fight back and get the upper hand through letting go.
Things won’t always go perfectly. You need to accept this. Instead of stressing out about every detail or how you look or what your dating partner thinks about your clothes, just focus on the moment and enjoying it.
Use ADHD Dating Advice to Find and Stay with a Great Relationship
Relationships should provide fun, comfort, and value to your life. Sure, we need to understand that relationships take work. Anything worth having requires work, though. What relationships should not give you, though, is more stress or negatively impact your physical or mental health.
Meeting someone and building a lasting relationship presents challenges. Even with some of the social difficulties of some ADHD symptoms, though, you can build a healthy dating relationship. Use this list of ADHD dating advice to help you get a good start on your next dating relationship.
