ADHD & RELATIONSHIPS: Learning to love through sensitivity, forgetfulness, and miscommunication

LATE BLOOMERS

Rich & Rox Pink

Self-improvement, Education

5.0 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Falling in love is easy. Staying in love—especially when ADHD is in the mix—is where the real work begins. In this episode, Rox opens up about her relationship history: falling fast, struggling with communication, and repeating patterns she didn’t understand until her ADHD diagnosis. She shares why celibacy, sobriety, and therapy helped her break free from the cycle of intense romance and heartbreak—and how meeting Rich changed everything.

Rich dives into the three biggest challenges of loving someone with ADHD:

Communication: How direct vs. emotional communication styles lead to frustration—and why “out of sight, out of mind” doesn’t mean “out of love.”
Forgetfulness: The impact of forgotten promises and messy environments—and why tone matters when asking for help.
Emotional Intensity: Navigating Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD), why ADHD is rooted in sensitivity, and the challenge of feeling “too much.”

But it’s not all hard work—there’s beauty in ADHD, too. Rox and Rich explore the superpowers of empathy, creativity, and humor that have strengthened their bond. Through honesty, kindness, and a whole lot of trial and error, they've learned that curiosity—not judgment—is the key to making love last.

If you've ever felt like your emotions are too big, your forgetfulness is too frustrating, or your relationships are too chaotic—this episode is for you.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today we are talking about ADHD and relationships.
0:03.0	I'm going to go over my very chaotic relationship history.
0:06.5	And I'm going to talk about the struggles of Dayton and ADHD, like communication.
0:10.5	They forget everything and RSD.
0:12.7	We might also do some of the strengths and good bits.
0:16.2	Depends whether we've got time or not.
0:18.0	Welcome to the Late Bloomer's podcast where we are getting our lives together.
0:22.8	Eventually. So it's my relationship history. Yeah, this could take a while. That's why I thought we might
0:28.4	run out of time. So let's start, I suppose. You've talked about your chaotic past of relationships.
0:36.7	How has ADHD played out in that? Well, the biggest thing is I didn't know I
0:42.0	had ADHD. So ADHD was affecting me in so many ways from the intensity and hyper focus of someone
0:49.8	and falling in love, then the struggles with communication, forgetting things, having them be
0:55.4	frustrated at me, me reacting very badly to that, and then very often breaking up and moving
1:01.5	on. So I actually don't know how I even managed to get to a year with some people without
1:07.7	knowing that I've got this massive, huge chunk of ADHD coming with me.
1:13.2	What did you think it was then?
1:16.1	Like, because that must have been quite tough, right?
1:17.7	So now you can label it and you can understand this is what happens chemically in my body
1:21.3	and my brain.
1:22.6	But like, did you?
1:24.3	I thought there was something wrong with me.
1:26.5	Right.
	...

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