No matter how well your marriage seems to be, ADHD marriage success tips can help make it better. Relationships can be hard. The closer and longer the relationship, the more difficult and challenging it can become to keep making it work. After all, a significant number of marriages fail and end in divorce.

Now, more than ever, we could all use a little marriage advice. No matter if you have been married for a week or twenty years, we all still have something valuable to learn about marriage and about our partner. For people with ADHD in particular, tips and strategies for helping make marriage work can act as powerful reminders to keep our relationships going strong.

In this post, we want to talk through some simple but effective ADHD marriage success tips. Many people with ADHD find relationships difficult. In particular, people with ADHD can run into problems with marriage and simply not know what to do. Hopefully, these strategies can be put in place to help steer things back to the positive. Read on for what to do when ADHD issues threaten to sour your marriage relationship.

Regularly Practice Listening

Any list of ADHD marriage success tips needs to start with the basic skill of listening. Every marriage requires effective communication to be successful. Relationships that don’t involve communication and listening ultimately aren’t mutually beneficial. Many times where communication fails, you end up with an authoritarian household or with partners who live mostly separate lives. Marriages shouldn’t work that way, and successful satisfying marriages don’t function like that.

People with ADHD sometimes struggle to both communicate well and to listen well. Often times, social interactions don’t come naturally to the person with ADHD. Rather, they have difficulty interpreting emotions and social cues. They even many times have trouble interpreting their own feelings and struggle with feelings of depression or low self-esteem.

Additionally, people with ADHD tend to become distracted and overly focused on things that impact them. Without meaning to, they can appear distracted in a conversation. They can seem as if they don’t hear the person speaking to them, or that they have other things on their mind. To the other person, the person with ADHD comes across as lacking empathy or concern. Whether or not the impression is true, even the appearance of no empathy can be devastating to a relationship.

In marriage, both parties need to go the extra mile to listen and communicate well. This involves intentionally practicing active listening. When your partner speaks to you, make a special effort to make eye contact with them and nod along with what they say.

To make this work, you should set reminders to have intentional conversations regularly with your partner. With your reminders, make certain that you go into the conversation with the intention of purposely listening. As you practice listening regularly, you will listen and communicate more effectively on a consistent basis.

Set Reminders to Think about Your Partner

Secondly, another important of our ADHD marriage success tips to keep in mind is simply to regularly think about and consider your partner. Many marriages start to unravel when one partner shows little consideration for their spouse. A partner can feel neglected when things just fall into the regular hum drum pace of life.

For people with ADHD, sometimes it’s easy to forget about the emotions of others. When people become stressed or overwhelmed, they might focus and dwell on their own anxiety and neglect others in their life. To fight back against this tendency, you need to intentionally think about your partner.

You can think about your partner by setting simple reminders. Many couples who have been married for a long time slip into a routine of never texting or calling one another during the day. Most of the time, though, that habit tends to hurt their relationship. You really should communicate in some way with your partner during most work days.

Therefore, you can set a reminder on your work email or on your phone that you need to text or call your spouse at a particular time each day. The conversation doesn’t have to be long or in depth. The purpose should be to remind you of your spouse and to make a small amount of connection.

The more ways you can remind yourself about your spouse the better. For instance, in addition to setting reminders to call or text, you can have a picture of your spouse at work. When you go on long distance trips, bring something that belongs to your spouse such as a blanket or photo or piece of clothing. These small things can help remind you of your partner and help to strength your connection to them.

Plan out a Weekend Just for Your Partner

Next, something else to consider with ADHD marriage success tips is to plan out a weekend just for your partner. In a marriage relationship, your partner desires your attention. They want to know and to be reminded that you think they are special. After all, they should hold a special place in your life as your life partner.

Unfortunately, in our hectic lives, we can many times go for months and even years without doing anything to show our partners what they really mean to us. As a result, grievances build up and ill-will grows within the relationship. After time, these negative feelings can drive almost any marriage to ruin.

To make sure that your partner knows you care about them, you need to intentionally set aside special time just for them. Ideally, at the minimum, you should plan a special weekend just for your partner once every three months. In a perfect world, this could be once a month, but with the realities of work and family, once every three months should be a good place to start.

Your special weekend doesn’t have to be an expensive extravagant trip. Rather, it should be a set aside intentional time where you can focus in on just your spouse. You need to think of what your spouse loves to do, and even if you don’t like it at all, schedule a date for you to share that experience together. For simple ideas, you could plan a picnic or plan to cook breakfast in bed.

The object should simply be showing your partner that you notice and care about them. The more you can plan events focused on your partner, the more they will want to do the same for you. In the end, your relationship will grow stronger overall.

Make a List of What you Love and Appreciate About Your Partner

Fourthly, as part of your ADHD marriage success tips you should regularly remind yourself of what you love about your partner. We just talked about setting time aside to show your partner you appreciate them. What you never want to do, though, is to simply go through the motions when you spend time with your spouse. If you don’t really feel that your partner is special to you, then if you try to “fake it,” they will more than likely see through your attempt.

Instead of trying to “fake it until you make it,” you instead need to remind yourself of what you love about your partner. Few people marry someone that they don’t appreciate or care for. Nonetheless, over time, love fades and what you appreciated at first can be forgotten. Ultimately, most marriages fail because we forget and life forces us to drift apart.

To fight against marriage drift, you have to intentionally remind yourself of why you fell in love in the first place. The best way to do this might involve keeping and referring to love notes or messages you had from when you dated. You can look back on those messages as hints of what first attracted you to your spouse.

Alternatively, when you have an argument with your spouse, you can sit down and write out the attributes that you love about your partner. Then you can write a note or text message to your spouse telling them the things you appreciate and love about them. While this might be difficult when you just had an argument, ultimately, it will show you why you love your partner and help strengthen your relationship over time. It will also help to diffuse your partner’s anger and help them to see the positives in your relationship.

See a Marriage Counselor

Finally, the last of our ADHD marriage success tips is to regularly see a marriage counselor. Unfortunately, our culture usually associates a negative stigma to seeing a counselor. This stigma often results because most couples only wait until their relationship has significant problems before seeing a professional. Rather than wait until disaster can’t be avoided, though, you need to start meeting with a counselor as early as possible.

You should think of a marriage counselor in much the same way as you would think of your family doctor. You need to meet with your family doctor for regular checkups as part of your preventative care routine. This way, your doctor can help keep an eye out on your overall health and any warning signs. If they see any small issues, they can then provide suggestions or recommendations for small course corrections. Regular checkups with your doctor can catch issues before you end up in the hospital or worse.

Your marriage counselor can act in a similar way for your marriage as your doctor does for your physical health. With meeting with a counselor on regular basis, your counselor can monitor your relationship’s health and offer small course corrections. With small changes over time, you don’t let any type of cancerous behavior stick around for long.

We would recommend looking around for a marriage counselor no matter how long you have been married. Ask your friends and family for recommendations. More than likely, most people you know have actually seen a counselor at one time or another. After you identify a counselor you like, schedule regular meetings maybe once every few months for checkups. While possibly awkward at first, you and your partner might come to love the opportunity to regularly assess your relationship.

Making ADHD Marriage Success Tips Work

We’ve reached the end of our ADHD marriage success tips. That just means, though, that you have reached the beginning of your journey towards creating a successful marriage. The hard part about learning success tips is that you next have to actually go put the strategies into action.

You can’t say any longer that you don’t know what to do to fix the problem. You can’t even avoid the problem anymore. Knowing the reasons for the problems and the ways to fix them means you need to take action.

To make sure that your ADHD marriage success tips work, you need to get your partner on board. Before doing anything else, sit down and start that conversation. Let them know that you want to keep working on your relationship and seek to improve communication. After you have your partner on board with you, talk through some possible strategies you can take together. One great tip to start with would be with counseling. See if they will agree to see a marriage counselor with you so that you both can identify issues and solutions together.

At the very least, we hope that this article gives you a place to start the conversation with your partner. Many problems in marriages take a good amount of time and effort to fix. None of our tips provide a quick easy fix. Instead, all of these strategies help to provide a new path to take towards a healthier and more fulfilling relationship.