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Hello;
My fiance was diagnosed Adhd last year. We have been together 8 years and live apart. His house is an unfinished mess for the past 12 years. I have lost all hope of him ever completing the renovation on his house. We called off our wedding 2 years ago so he could focus on his health and medication. I love him but am thinking my mental health cannot take this relationship anymore. I have suggested he go for therapy to get help on how to tackle his house but he refuses. I don't know what to say or do anymore.
Comments
Please consider if you should marry him
I’m sorry this has come to a standstill and makes you unhappy. It sounds unpromising for marriage and family, which puts hard demands on a partner.
If its not possible to arrange a wedding together with a fiancé, perhaps one shouldn’t marry them. I did, but have regetted it in hindsight. You need a dependable partner on your life journey.
My ex boyfriend’s 20+ year project.
My exbf was building a house when I met him in 2004. It is still unfinished. After I dumped him in 2015, this was his only shelter. You would think that common sense survival instincts would kick in, and he would finish it, but no. It doesn’t have working plumbing or electricity yet, even though he laid out pipes and wires over a decade ago. In his whining threatening emails, he complained how he has to go to the bathroom in plastic bags like it’s my fault! He has “concepts of a plan” on how to make it livable, he said. The entire time he was in my house, he junked it up with broken small appliances and ancient computers he bought off the internet with my money, so he could “fix them up and sell them”. He never sold anything, and I had to squeeze by his junk all of the time. After our breakup, he took some of the junk away, and I paid guys to trash the rest of it. They were laughing how nobody uses these types of computers any more. The most ridiculous item he tried to repair to sell was a pressure cooker with a lid that had shattered into hundreds of pieces. He dutifully glued all of these pieces together with Elmer’s water based glue, when I kept saying he needed to throw that mess away and fix the hole in our roof before it rains again. Nope, he’s going to waste days and days gluing together the lid for a pressure cooker. Think about it: it’s a PRESSURE cooker!
Hello sickandtired;
Hello sickandtired;
Thank you so much for your reply. You hung in there for 11 years!!! I am not sure if I can put in anymore years with this man. He did the wiring and plumbing but has no kitchen and does his dishes in the bathtub. When we first started dating he would not let me in his house for 6 months. Was this to get me to fall in love and then when he did show me his house, I would be more accepting? The house looks like a hoarder lives there and I can no longer go in his house. From what I have read the odds of him ever finishing the house seem slim to none . I strongly feel that its not a matter of he can't do it, I believe he won't do it. I am constantly hearing how much he hates the house and how much it brings him down but he will not go for therapy to get help in obtaining some tools and some outside help to prompt him to just start somewhere!!!
I wish I had left much sooner
Yes I hung in there for 11 years and I regret wasting that time trying to be patient and trying to help him. He didn’t show me his house for several months either, and I never was invited inside his travel trailer where he actually lived before he put the roof up. I had to pay for him to redo the roof after the wood started rotting from years of exposure to the rain with no shingles on the roof! His house looked hoarded too. It’s amazing how similar these symptoms are across the board with so many diagnosed with adhd. He was angry all of the time, and spent many days lying on the couch when there was so much work he needed to finish. The only time he seemed to like working was at the beginning of his many many fruitless projects. He never had a job after our first two months together, and he brought in absolutely no income. He had no problem living off of my money. My advice to you is to either start a new life without him, or resign yourself to a life of misery and frustration where he will never appreciate your efforts. My life immediately improved emotionally and physically and financially when I got him out of my life. He was pulling me down, and I was making myself sick trying to swim for both of us while he was hyper critical and resentful of me. You don’t deserve that kind of life. Don’t be guilted into marrying him out of duty or sympathy. I’m so glad I never married my ex. It’s so much simpler to get out now without the hassle and expense of a divorce. You will be amazed how quickly you will feel much better.
So any hope I have of him
So any hope I have of him finishing his house are fruitless? It is hard to accept that it may never happen. Now he wants to buy me a car because he does make a good living and he says that the money is just sitting there. i gotta give him credit for not spending foolishly. However, I would rather he take that money and hire someone to help him put flooring in the house and install the kitchen. But should I suggest this? Also, as a side note, he looks at porn and i've read this makes it harder for the ADHD person to break free. The porn causes shame and guilt and traps the person in their surroundings. Sometimes I truly feel that he does not want to leave his house because of his porn and then he would have no privacy to use it. Thoughts?
He'll only do what he wants to do
Hey may finish the house one day and he may not. It has been 12 years so I would guess this isn't a priority for him. His actions are showing you it's not. You can push and push and push but keep in mind that if you marry him, you will be doing this for the rest of your life. If he is diagnosed, but not getting ADHD treatment, this isn't going to change. I was with an untreated guy too who had many good qualities, however, the unfinished projects were endless and he was addicted to porn (among other issues). I can tell you, those two things aren't going to improve in any way unless he really, really wants them to. Unfortunately, HE has to want these things. He probably genuinely loves you and shows his love in the ways that make sense to him (e.g. the car), but he may never be able to be the accountable partner you actually need.
The car
The car may be a distraction from the real issues of he can’t get anything done, and he wants to live alone with his porn. The car might make you feel like you are more invested in the relationship and make it harder for you to justify leaving. Think of it as a bribe to stay, or throwing you a bone, so you aren’t as likely to complain about the unfinished house. Also, guys like my ex boyfriend had a grandiose sense that he didnt need anyone to help him finish the house. He took it as an insult when I offered to pay for workers to help him finish his house. His sense of grandiosity extended into other areas of life’s problems too, like when I had an inheritance dispute with my brother. He insisted that I NOT hire an attorney, that he could just “do some research on the internet” and represent me against my brother’s attorney, even though he only had a high school education, it seemed perfectly logical to him, and a waste of money to hire any professionals to do any jobs. You need to seriously sit with your man’s behaviors and ask yourself, what kind of rigid thought processes are going on inside him that makes his priorities so maladaptive for living with another person in a committed relationship. Guys like this are better off living alone. I think moving in with him or worse yet, marrying him would be the worst thing you could do for your emotional and physical health. Your inner voice of reason is trying to tell you this.
I was married to a man who had a porn addiction
This guy seems to have the bad qualities of both my ex husband and my ex boyfriend. I was married to an airline pilot for 12 years and he was addicted to porn. It was a nightmare. Although he was highly educated and made good money from an exciting career, porn and sexual addiction ruined his life. He was a perpetual liar and a serial cheater. Something about the thrill of almost getting caught made him sexually inappropriate with some of my best friends. He was so bold they were afraid to tell me until I told them I was getting a divorce. You seriously need to look at your man’s porn addiction and lack of motivation to finish projects as merely symptoms of much deeper dysfunction than just looking at nude women and not finishing the house. Instead of asking if there is any hope he will finish the house, you should be asking if he is capable of being a decent partner in a marriage. What kind of parent would he be if he can’t or won’t follow through on his promises? What kind of husband would he be if his need for porn comes before your needs for honesty and fidelity??? My ex husband gave me several std’s but then blamed me and told everyone I was cheating. Habitual lying, as with all addicts, is the death knell for any marriage. You need to ask yourself WHY are you willing to settle for a man with so many serious flaws? Men are not “fixer uppers” that you can remodel into your dream guy. The basic traits they have are unchangeable. You have to find a man who already possesses the traits you desire. There are literally millions of other men to choose from who would cherish you as you deserve to be. You may say you love him, but maybe you just love the man you THOUGHT he was, not the truth of who he really is, plaguing you with all of these unacceptable behaviors. Just because you have devoted years of your life trying to help him or change him does NOT justify sacrificing more of your years hoping for improvement. Men like this DO NOT change. Any random guy you see in the grocery store is likely to be a better husband than this guy.
Its not just the porn. I
Its not just the porn. I have had to endure constant comments on actresses over the years about how stunningly beautiful some of them are and how this woman or that woman looks like a model. This past Thanksgiving I snapped after he made a comment about an actress and I asked him why he never calls me stunning. I told him that he has never used that word to describe me. Here's the response I got from him verbatim...."I am not responsible for your self esteem"!!! I couldn't believe it!! So not only am I, supposedly, responsible for my own self esteem, he throws it back at me and makes it my fault!!! Zero accountability on his part. And the funny thing is he has always told me that if he is being an asshole to bring it to his attention. Well he was a major asshole and I brought it to his attention and then no accountability on his part. So I am left with policing his comments and disrespectful ways and then when I do bring up something hurtful he did, he does not take responsibility for it. Needless to say I did not go with him to his parents that evening for Thanksgiving dinner.
Same here!
My exbf would comment about waitresses at many restaurants we were at. It was maddening! He would fixate on one particular waitress, usually the one who was serving us, and he would comment to me about her body, her lips or the size of her stomach! One time he actually asked the poor girl if she had just given birth because, “ you have a beautiful figure, but your stomach is sticking out so I’m wondering if you just had a baby?” I was mortified!!! Another time he fixated on a gal who had a lip ring. He kept talking to me about her as I tried to ignore him and just finish my meal, then he said, “ I wonder what it would be like to kiss a girl with a lip ring???” Later when we were not in public, I confronted him about his words and he accused me of being jealous! I wasn’t jealous, I was furious at the disrespect he showed both me and her! Waitstaff are NOT there to entertain or erotically stimulate the dining customer, they are there just to serve food and make a living. It made me realize that he looked at all women as merely objects for his entertainment, not sentient beings who deserve respect. I realized that my feelings meant nothing to him, and as you said, he took absolutely no accountability for his outrageous behavior. NOT good husband material!
My ex husband was the same way. A porn addiction objectifies women, and it’s the reason his fourth wife is now divorcing him. I was his third wife, but for years I thought I was his second wife because he didn’t respect me enough to tell me the truth that he had been married twice before me. I found out that all four of us had divorced him because of porn and cheating. Please know that a porn addiction is a progressive thing, they get tired of just looking at it, and it progresses to masturbation, then they have an irresistible urge to act it out with real people. My ex husband, who operated Boeing 757’s and had hundreds of peoples’ lives in his hand at any given time, was traveling to different cities, meeting women from the internet, putting them in handcuffs, etc., having sex with them, videoing it, and then sharing the videos with random men he met from their mutual addiction to porn sites. In therapy he told me that these thoughts dominated his concentration during his operation of the flight, and that he was constantly compelled to check his phone to see the reactions to the videos he posted as he was flying the plane!!!! Please try not to think about that the next time you board a jet!!!! What I’m trying to tell you is it sounds to me like your guy has built his life around porn instead of you. He is deep into it, to the point that it rules his thinking and his life choices such as choosing to live alone even though he’s been engaged to you for years so he can have free unaccountable access to his porn. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that a marriage certificate and wedding vows will magically make this insidious addiction disappear. It won’t! You are guaranteeing a life of misery and divorce if you choose to marry this guy.
Hi dottiecool....
Many of us married that person you are posting about...I'm now getting a divorce after 16 years....The messy hoarding, it doesn't stop, because it's being done from the reality of his mind...Not his will...
My wife and I could have been friends for ever probably....She is a perfect example of person who should always live single...Any time justification is the reality of a mind who's life is highly intrusive, that will always lead to suffering...I suggest you never marry a person who is irresponsible to the work (in all area's) it takes daily for marriages...When we know it becomes self inflicted suffering...Looks like you have 8 years of seeing the real him...
Hello, thank you so much for
Hello, thank you so much for your reply. When we met on a dating site, he was not marriage or relationship minded. He only wanted someone to go for coffee with. I was marriage minded. I now wish we had only remained friends instead of what has now transpired as 8 years of heartache. I sometimes feel like I am just another one of his unfinished projects. It is hard to understand that part of their of thinking is not from a willed perspective. And how they cannot foresee the hurt or consequences their actions have on their partner. Or maybe they see but they do not want to feel any further pain so they compartmentalize it. whatever the case may be they still have free will. Another stressful aspect of our relationship is that he has driven away all his friends because he is too embarrassed about his living conditions. So I am the anchor and the sounding board for everything. I feel this is not a healthy component to a relationship. A man needs man friends to bounce things off of. It is draining!!
You need to step back and read your post as if it was mine!
Do you realize that you have made (allowed) his inabilities to become the center of your life? Is his issues what you want as the dominate thought in your mind everyday? Do you not want a life of your own?
I asked these hard question's because I lived it just like that for several years...Until I placed so many boundaries to free myself up to live...Which destroyed most everything I shared w/her, because of her controlling spirit, RSD and Impulsivity...Which doesn't allow for respect for others...Only one life will matters, and it's not ours!
Yes you are just another project
Your comment about being just another unfinished project hit me hard, because it is SO TRUE. A major symptom of adhd is hyperfocus, which is the fascination with something new, but then over time that new thing isn’t so new any more, and the person loses interest, and moves on to the next fascinating new object. We are just objects to them. And when a new object comes along, their focus shifts toward it. You will never get that hyperfocus back that once made you fall in love with him, that made you feel like you were the center of his world… because you are not his focus any more. You are neglected and a source of irritation to him… just like the unfinished house.