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Be a partner who is reliable and accountable 

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Families who make goals together keep goals together.

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Most Esteemed Captain Awkward:

My partner R (she/her) and I (she/her) have been together for 3+ years. She is definitely antsy to get engaged and I thought we’d be planning for children by now, but things have come up that make it hard for me to imagine taking the next step. We mostly have a great relationship, but R often has criticisms that boil down to me not being thoughtful enough. However, I genuinely don’t know how I can fix this. It’s tough because, due to my abusive childhood in a controlling religious (cult) environment, I have a lot of issues with Never Being Good Enough, and I get so triggered by R sometimes. I’m working hard on being less defensive in these situations, but I don’t know how to take accountability and apologize for something that I don’t actually think is wrong without sounding fake.

A few examples:

• A few months into dating, I learned a show I was obsessed with was leaving Broadway and decided to go see it before I couldn’t. I purchased two tickets and told R that I’d love for her to come but that I understood if she couldn’t. (I figured that if cost was an issue, she’d let me know and hopefully let me cover it, but I didn’t want to assume that would be OK or pressure her.) However, she was very offended and said I made her feel like I “wasn’t thinking of her at all.”

• R’s sister has a toddler and asked R’s mom to travel (~2 hr flight) to them to watch the kid while she went on vacation. R asked me if I wanted to join and I said no immediately. R was upset and said that I had “said no too quickly/I wasn’t thinking of her feelings/was thinking only of negatives.”

• I attended a conference that is directly related to my work but also personally important and meaningful to me (think, a teapot convention focusing on gay autistic tea pot makers) While we texted constantly and talked daily, R was anxious and accusatory, asking me if I was distracted or if I’d been drinking. On the first full day of conference activities, R sent me a text making it clear she felt “not like a priority” and was upset with me. I immediately called her, but she would not talk because she said I sounded upset. (Fair! I was!) We talked it out over several hours the next morning, with me missing most of the conference events I’d been looking forward to.

• Recently, it was her birthday. After weeks of asking what she’d like, she told me she just wanted a specific cake, which I promptly ordered. I did some fun decor (balloons, streamers, etc) at our house, too. The weekend seemed OK but on Monday (her actual birthday) she sent me a text saying she didn’t want to have her birthday dinner because I had failed to wish her a happy birthday and bring her coffee in bed. When she got home, we had a really horrible fight where she detailed the ways I have failed re: her birthday- it was detailed: not putting cupcakes on a plate or doing candles correctly, while attributing these failures to (apparently) my fear of vulnerability and inability to follow through. 

I am trying to be less defensive when R brings up ways I’ve hurt her, but I fear that R has expectations that I cannot meet. Sometimes it almost feels like, in R’s mind, a negative emotion = evidence that I’ve done something wrong. With the first conflict about the trip, I can understand feeling a little taken aback and hurt that I was prepared to make the trip solo if she said no, but I disagree that this means I did something wrong. With the child care situation, I get being disappointed that I said no, but I disagree that it’s reasonable to criticize me for saying no too fast. Am I just too set in my ways? Can I help her to understand how this is affecting me? Is this even fixable? Am I a thoughtless ADHD jerk?

Happy Holidays,

Never Getting it Right

Happy 2025 and other holidays yourself!

Don’t marry someone who shits on your enthusiasm or regularly reminds you of what it was like to grow up in an abusive cult, is my advice for fellow ADHD-ers and everyone.

You describe a pattern where your partner continually ruins nice things you do for her and fun things you do for you. You also describe a pattern where you communicate straightforwardly, she does not, and then she punishes you for not having read her mind. Worse yet, instead of arguing about the specifics what you did vs. what she expected with an eye to better defining expectations or finding solutions for the future, the fights devolve into arguments about what kind of person you are (thoughtless). That is a sure sign of bad faith, right up there with “the more effort you make to understand the other person’s point of view and communicate yours, the worse it gets.” And I think you nailed it when you noticed that her negative emotions get recycled into excuses to blame you, which is an extremely common incubator for emotional abuse.

People have choices about how they treat you, so let’s review her choices relative to her available options at the time.

She made you feel bad about an objectively awesome thing, like getting tickets to your favorite Broadway show and inviting your shiny new girlfriend along. If she had had logistical or financial concerns that prevented her from saying yes, what stopped her from raising them? Her: “I’d love to but money is tight just now.”‘ You: “I totally understand. My treat!” Her: “Oh no, I’d love to, but that doesn’t work with my schedule.”/”I’m not really into that show.” You: “I totally understand, I had to jump on the tickets to get seats at all. But no pressure! I’ll find an friend to go with and we’ll plan something together another time.”

She couldn’t stop you from going on the work trip outright, so instead she manipulated you into spending most of it on the phone, reassuring her that she was a priority and dodging accusations that you were drinking. So what if you *were* drinking? You’re an adult, was that not allowed for some reason? And so what if your priority during that trip was to do work and make the professional connections you came to make? What would keeping you on the phone for hours get her that the words “Have fun, let’s talk when you get back” wouldn’t solve, besides controlling your time and attention and making you feel guilty? Why is you getting to do a job you care about with people who get you a bad thing? A partner is not a pacifier!

She’s had three birthdays and counting to answer the question “What do you want to do for your birthday?” with “I’d love my favorite cake on the fanciest plate we have, but my dream is to be awakened with birthday coffee in bed.” If you’d known how important it was to her, you would have done it in a heartbeat. And yet, she is mad at you for not doing stuff she never told you about, even when you asked her direct questions about what she wanted. She’s also completely unappreciative of the nice stuff you did do. The fact that she punished herself by canceling her birthday dinner just so she could make you feel extra bad about it is certainly a choice, but it’s not something you caused by existing within a non-standard brain.

I’ll confess, the “You said ‘no’ to babysitting too fast” example made me cackle with self-recognition. If she wanted you to come along, she has a right to be sad that you declined, she’s ultimately claiming to be mad that you didn’t fake interest in going before you declined. She could have communicated her disappointment, asked if there was anything that would make you reconsider, or laughed and said “Wow, tell me how you really feel!” But she couldn’t resist an opportunity for critique.

In my experience, when someone harps that you didn’t ask a question or say no just right, it’s usually because they don’t think you should have been allowed to ask that question or say no at all, but they have juuuuuuuust enough self awareness to know that if they admit that, they’ll definitely lose the argument.

This lady seems like she is very bad at being your partner.  Life is hard enough without turning fun, optional things into arguments! If she wants someone who will never buy tickets to fun shit on the spur of a moment or blurt out an answer, then she clearly wants a different person! She has the option to stop tormenting you anytime and find someone who communicates telepathically.

And yet, your email subject line was “Am I A Big, Thoughtless, ADHD Jerk?” and your question contains a troubling pattern that I’ve observed in multiple letters from neurodivergent people, people with diagnosed mental health conditions, and people with past or ongoing experiences of abuse (and associated Venn diagrams):

a) The assumption that a history of trauma and/or a complicated brain makes you an unreliable narrator of your own life who cannot *ever* trust your feelings or reactions.

b) Leading to the assumption that you are automatically the weakest link in any unrewarding relationship or intractable interpersonal conflict.

c) Followed by the assumption that the best way to repair situations that hurt you is by repairing yourself. You will always be an imperfect being, and there will always be more You to work on, so the fact that self-improvement doesn’t work the first or tenth or one hundredth time doesn’t mean the cycle can’t repeat indefinitely!

I will never argue that trauma, mental illness, and neurodivergence have *no* effect on one’s daily experience or relationships, and if they are interfering with yours it’s worth seeking available treatment. But I will argue that when you are engaging with someone who is unkind to you, “How can I fix myself to be more ‘normal’ and make my reactions to their bad behavior smaller and more palatable?” is not only NOT the solution to the problem, it’s a dangerous trap. There is no amount of “work” you can do — no therapy, no medication, no accommodations or workarounds, no amount of masking or policing your emotions that will magically make someone stop being mean to you once they’ve started. Pretending otherwise only ever serves people who want to continue to abuse and exploit you without consequences (and their enablers).

The longer you focus on your reactions to an abusive person’s behavior, question your own judgment, and sink more and more effort into fixing and sustaining the relationship, the longer you linger in harm’s way, and the longer you reinforce the lie that if other people are assholes to you, it’s most likely because something inside you made them treat you like that.

Let’s talk about how your childhood history is rippling through this situation. Often when people invoke trauma triggers, they talking about problems like a) flashbacks and outsized reactions to present stimuli inspired by reminders of the past or encountering similar circumstances in the present and b) behaviors that helped them survive in a stressful environment that don’t translate well to *dissimilar* contexts.

If a zero-abuse world is impossible, it would be super cool if everyone only ever encountered *one* abusive situation or person in life, and that once you got through yours, you get to mark yourself safe and be done for good. But life doesn’t work like that. For abuse survivors, the necessary skill isn’t automatically banishing every troublingly familiar warning bell or negative feeling to the emotional spam filter while you take more deep breaths or count yellow things nearby or remind yourself that it’s probably all in your head. Skills for self-soothing and grounding oneself in present circumstances can be quite useful! But so are discernment and pattern recognition: Asking: “Am I reacting to something that is happening here, and now, in this room or am I reacting based on past experience or manufactured future fear?” only works if everyone understands that one possible answer is “YES, RUN AWAY, NOW!”

In other words, if your partner’s brand of making you feel like you’ll never be good enough (so that you’ll blame yourself and try harder to anticipate her needs) reminds you of how you felt growing up inside an abusive cult, the simplest answer is that it feels familiar because it is familiar. That defensiveness, anger, and sense of unreality you feel about the situations you described aren’t overreactions or artifacts of past abuse, they’re understandable reactions to how you’re being treated in the present. And your reluctance to tie the knot and your timely request for help aren’t a sign that your brain works “wrong.” These are your self-preservation instincts trying to protect you from committing to someone who makes you unhappy. Can you imagine trying to plan an entire wedding with someone who can’t answer basic questions about what she wants honestly, thinks everything you do is wrong, and everything that goes wrong is somehow your fault? NO!

You asked: Is any of this fixable?

Not from inside the relationship and not on any kind of predictable timeline. Once you break up, a lot of stuff will get instantly fixed for you, in that you won’t be around a person who continually steals your joy and erodes your sense of self. You’ll be able to lick your wounds and find a compatible, nice person who is enthusiastic about you when you’re ready.

For your partner to fix anything, she’d have to own the problem, go to a therapist, ask, “Why do I belittle, blame, and try to control my partner whenever I feel bad?” and do whatever years of work are involved in unpacking that question and choosing a different way to be. Somebody who can turn theater tickets and birthday cake into an excuse to be mean to you does not seem likely to do *any* of that anytime soon, and I think attempting to talk to her into it is only going to buy you more bullshit.

Be swift, be quiet, and go. Then pick up your loud, beautiful life where you left off before this person crawled up inside it. Love and solidarity, always.

Make the new year the best year yet for your relationship.

The post How to Make (and Keep) New Year’s Resolutions for Your Relationship appeared first on The Gottman Institute.