Are you in a relationship with someone neurodivergent and you’re finding it difficult to connect? Do differences between you and your partner place a strain on your friendship? Would you like your relationship to be easier but you aren’t sure how you could make it better?
Having a relationship with someone neurodivergent can be challenging. The different ways of thinking and varied lived experiences that neurodivergency causes can contribute to misunderstandings and hurt feelings, especially for those in romantic relationships. It may seem like your partner doesn’t care for you, they aren’t willing or able to accommodate your needs, and you often feel frustrated.
Being in a relationship with someone neurodivergent can easily involve challenges that have specific challenges that other couples may not face. What remains the same is the need to invest effort and overcome difficulties is necessary in all relationships.
Fortunately, most relationships can improve if you and your partner are willing to consider how you approach key areas of the relationship. This will require intention, commitment, motivation, and a willingness to be open and honest with each other. But through understanding your partner and how to keep relationships healthy, you and your partner could have the potential to improve the relationship.
This article is written primarily for the partners of someone who is neurodivergent. The following newsletter will contain an article about being neurodivergent in a relationship with someone who is neurotypical.
What is neurodivergency?
Neurodivergent isn’t a medical condition or a diagnosis. It’s an intentionally ambiguous term that is used to differentiate between people whose brains work the same way as the majority of other people – neurotypical, and those whose brains work differently – neurodivergent.
Since there’s no such thing as a ‘normal’ brain, there are a huge range of behaviours and personality types that can be considered neurodivergent. Neurodivergency can involve being diagnosed with a condition, and it can also refer to people who have traits of one or several conditions but don’t meet the criteria for a diagnosis.
The most common neurodivergent conditions include:
- Autism
- Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD)/Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
- Bipolar Disorder
- Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder
- Dyslexia, dyspraxia, and other learning disabilities
- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
These conditions can affect social skills, the ability to learn, and/or emotional regulation. They can make things that are easy to the point of being automatic for the majority of neurotypical people feel incredibly challenging for someone neurodivergent. Things that are easy and self-evident for someone with a neurodivergency can be strange and confusing to others.
Because of these differences, forming close relationships can be challenging, especially those as interconnected as couples. You could often feel hurt, frustrated, overburdened, and/or unimportant, while your partner could believe that you aren’t willing or able to understand them while ignoring the efforts they invest in the relationship.
While this can make having a healthy and rewarding relationship with someone neurodivergent more difficult, if you’re both willing to invest the effort that’s often necessary to cultivate a mutually rewarding relationship, you can learn techniques that have the potential to reduce misunderstandings, promote acceptance, and help both of you feel recognised and appreciated for your roles in the relationship.
Learning and practicing these techniques is often even more useful and important in relationships with a neurodiversity because of the higher potential for differences.
Techniques for a healthier relationship
Although the specific challenges of your relationship and how you can navigate them will be unique to you and your partner, most couples, both neurodivergent and neurotypical, can benefit from considering and potentially making changes in the following areas of their relationship.
1) Build healthy communication habits
The ability for partners to effectively communicate with each other is one of the most important features of a healthy relationship. Communication enables you to think highly of each other and work as a team.
Many people are in relationships that are less satisfying than they could be if they communicated more often and shared the goal of learning from and understanding each other.
When you and your partner communicate frequently and effectively, you’re more likely to understand each other, enjoy spending time together, avoid damaging conflicts, and know how to make your partner feel loved.
Healthy communication involves the casual conversations you regularly have with each other that are enjoyable and shouldn’t take effort, as well as the harder conversations you have about meaningful topics you might not agree on that have the potential to become heated. You keep each other informed of your inner worlds – which are always changing – and make the effort to explain yourself, especially when you’re upset.
Through communicating, you can learn about and appreciate each other, discover how hard each of you works to make the other happy, and much more. You ask questions and listen instead of making assumptions and are willing to patiently explain yourself when you aren’t being understood.
In relationships with someone neurodivergent, communicating may be more complicated since they can have specific ways of interacting and may misinterpret common exchanges. They may struggle to recognise subtleties and non-verbale cues such as body language or changes in tone and be confused by indirect ways of communicating like sarcasm and telling someone things are fine when they clearly aren’t.
They can misinterpret your actions and how you express yourself: unsolicited touching and surprises can be overwhelming, gift-giving or compliments can be interpreted as attempts at manipulation, and casual conversations can seem unnecessary.
They can also be blunt when expressing emotions, such as being brutally honest when you ask for their opinion or cold when you bring up an opportunity you’re excited about, which can be painful.
But many of these misunderstandings can be avoided through identifying what causes them so you can modify your communication style to better suit one another. This could be telling your partner that although you understand they prefer being direct, you struggle not to get offended when they’re overly blunt in delivering feedback. Your partner could tell you that they get confused when you say one thing but mean something else.
Because changing communication styles can be difficult for anyone but especially someone neurodivergent, it’s also valuable to consider modifying how you react when you’re upset. When your partner does something you think is hurtful, you’re likely telling yourself they were being intentionally unkind and don’t care about your feelings. Because this is upsetting, it will cause most people get upset out or withdraw.
However, this is an assumption. You can have an easier time talking to each other and feel more comfortable if you’re willing to suspend judgement until you discover their intentions. This requires asking your partner what they meant when they do or say things you dislike and believe them – usually – if they tell you that they weren’t trying to be hurtful.
When you aren’t able to have these conversations or your partner doesn’t respond in a way that you like, such as denying they used the tone you accused them of or claiming you’re overreacting, it’s useful to be generous towards your partner.
This means believing the best possible explanations for their behaviour. If they snap at you and are unapologetic, you attribute this to the extra pressure they’ve been under at work rather than thinking it’s a reflection of how they feel towards you. If you ask your partner to run an errand on the way home and they forget, rather than thinking it’s a sign that they expect you to manage everything, you remind yourself that remembering errands isn’t one of their strengths but they’re very good at reminding you of upcoming appointments.
Although there will be times when you hurt each other, when you regularly talk to each other you can more easily think of your partner as someone you like and love and typically get along with so you’ll want the relationship to return to its normal enjoyable state as quickly as possible.
Communication is what makes relationships rewarding and enjoyable. Couples should want to have meaningful discussions as well as light-hearted conversations with each other because they like talking together.
If you and your partner struggle to have these conversations, they can be difficult and awkward at first – you could be worried about saying the wrong thing and/or unsure what to talk about. But the more often you make time to talk to each other while being present and undistracted, the better you can get at having them so they can become more and more rewarding.
2) Keep conflicts healthy
Even with strong communication habits, conflicts in relationships are largely unavoidable, but they don’t have to be damaging if you can keep them healthy.
Healthy conflicts are those where you’re both reasonable, treat each other more or less fairly, and you work resolve your differences rather than aiming to hurt each other. You can be angry, offended, and frustrated, but you understand that you and your partner are working together to find a solution to your differences so you can both be happy.
This is a challenge for many couples. Staying calm and treating your partner fairly when you’re upset is hard, especially when you feel that they aren’t being fair either. But how you handle conflict has a huge impact on the quality of the relationship; with few exceptions, fights are the greatest source of negativity.
When a relationship is negative, couples are less likely to think well of each other: they ignore bids for attention, withhold affection, and fixate on their partners mistakes and faults. Fights are more frequent and take longer to recover from because they tend to think the worst of each other and pay more attention to what they dislike about each other and how they’ve been hurt.
This isn’t an enjoyable or fulfilling state for a relationship to be in.
Since so much negativity usually comes from unhealthy fights, most couples can benefit a great deal from improving their approach to conflicts.
Because fights and disagreements are often emotionally-charged experiences, and many people with a neurodivergency express and respond to their emotions differently, conflicts can be even more likely to result in hurt feelings and misunderstandings because each partner thinks the other isn’t responding appropriately or being reasonable.
For someone neurodivergent who struggles to recognise subtle emotional cues that indicate their partner is becoming upset, heated agreements can seem to come out of nowhere, which can make them feel surprised and attacked, and potentially think that their partner is being unfair.
When fights begin suddenly, especially for someone who might not have picked up on building tension, the conflict is at a greater risk of being unhealthy: they can shut down, withdraw or become defensive and unresponsive.
But disagreements are more likely to stay healthy if you adopt a ‘soft start-up’. All couples can benefit from this but for someone neurodivergent, who may need time to prepare for an emotional exchange, it can be even more valuable.
Having a soft start-up means that you calmly approach your partner with a concern you want to discuss rather than a personal complaint about them. You state facts, such as reminding your partner of a promise they made, instead of being critical or exaggerating. You explain how you feel while being as realistic as possible and without blaming them for making you feel a certain way. Whenever possible, include compliments so they feel appreciated and to remind yourself of their positive qualities.
The goal is to find a solution without either of you feeling criticised or attacked so you can work together. Since this is easier when you’re calm and want to cooperate, it’s important to commit to self-soothing throughout disagreements and potentially helping each other stay calm as well. This could require finding humour in the situation, acknowledging other times they did what you wanted, apologising for saying something unfair, or recognising that you need to take a break.
Taking breaks is important when conflicts are escalating so you don’t become overwhelmed and feel incapable of expressing yourself clearly or treating each other fairly.
The ability to recognise when you’re no longer calm and a willingness to step away from the discussion has the potential to prevent productive disagreements from becoming hurtful fights that take time to recover from.
People with neurodivergency may need breaks more often because of the extra work that understanding emotions can take so they become overwhelmed faster and more easily. They might not express this in a way that’s clear to their partner so they seem calm despite being highly emotional), which can make their responses seem crueller.
When you’re feeling emotionally overwhelmed in conflicts, it’s easy to say something you later regret. It’s often satisfying in the moment, but it only brings short-term satisfaction.
You can help resist the temptation to say something hurtful that will cause future problems if you consider what you want long-term. Usually this is being happy with your partner, and getting upset and making unfair comments doesn’t serve this outcome.
Responding reasonably often requires slowing down your reactions. Fights can make you feel that you have to respond quickly, but automatic reactions are unlikely to be ones that you’re proud of, so you’re more likely to do or say something you’ll regret.
By taking time to think about how you want to respond, you can have the best chance of keeping conflicts healthy. Stay curious and open-minded instead of making assumptions about your partner’s beliefs, behaviour, and motivations, especially if they have a neurodivergency.
When you usually think highly of each other and have tools to prevent disagreements from becoming harmful fights, your relationship can be more positive and rewarding.
3) Adaptation
In order for any relationship to be rewarding for both partners, it’s almost always necessary to adapt your behaviour and expectations.
Adapting your behaviour involves learning what upsets or annoys your partner and what makes them feel loved so you can incorporate these things into how you treat them and how you act when you’re together. If your partner is naturally tidier than you are, you might put more of an effort into cleaning; if your partner hates whistling you could remind yourself not to do this around them.
Adaptation may be more one-sided with someone neurodivergent. While it is possible for neurodivergent people to change and tolerate behaviours they dislike, this is often more challenging for them than it would be for someone neurotypical. A sense of order that is gained through routines can feel essential, so they could be doing fewer things to meet your needs and preferences, but they’re working to adapt more than it appears.
Expectations refer to the things you assumed would take place in your relationship, such as sleeping in together on weekend mornings, sharing financial goals, or both having similar tastes in music. Expectations range in significance from small traits and routines you believed you would share with your partner without being fully aware of them, to being prominent in your mind and essential to feeling satisfied with the relationship.
Because neurodivergency can cause strong aversions to certain things, as well as potentially unusual interests and personality traits, you may have more expectations to recognise and adjust than you would if you were in a relationship with someone neurotypical. Your partner might not be able to tolerate surprises so you become less spontaneous; they could be deeply annoyed by background music so you use headphones when they’re home.
It’s natural to wish that your partner was comfortable doing more of what you enjoy and acknowledging that this would make you happier instead of telling yourself that you’re perfectly fine accepting your partner as they are. Being honest with yourself is a valuable practice, as is being realistic about your partner’s nature and limits. Recognising what they can’t do and accepting this will likely allow both of you to be happier and reduce friction in the relationship.
However, some people adapt too much in an attempt to make their relationship work. They behave in ways that are unnatural and unauthentic. This is unhealthy and often unsustainable. You can become disconnected from yourself while coming to resent your partner.
Adapting doesn’t mean tolerating behaviour you think is unacceptable or letting important needs go unmet – if you aren’t happy and can’t accept some things that your partner is unable to do, you might not be compatible.
It may also be necessary to ask yourself if your partner is abusive or the relationship is toxic, which would mean that staying would harm your mental health and potentially be dangerous. Even if their behaviour is being influenced by neurodivergency, the context doesn’t change the risks of being in an unhealthy relationship.
Being willing and able to adapt in your relationship – within healthy limits – is valuable as it can enable you to enjoy the parts of your partner that you like best while doing your best to accept the ways you wish were they different. This can be even more important if your partner is neurodivergent.
4) Recognise each other’s strengths and weaknesses
A common source of dissatisfaction and resentment in relationships is feeling that the division of labour is unequal; this often refers to the responsibilities each of you has, how much you do for one another, the mental loads you carry, and more. Inequality can be even more prominent in relationships where there is a neurodivergency because their condition can make some everyday tasks highly demanding, so both partners can think that they do more than the other.
Most partners can benefit from discussing how they feel about their roles and shared responsibilities so you can consider making changes while learning to appreciate what each of you already does.
When you incorporate your strengths and weaknesses, you can give yourselves the best chance of being as satisfied as possible with what you and your partner are each responsible for.
If you’re both already happy with your responsibilities and think that each of you does a fair amount, then making changes could be unnecessary. But this can still be a valuable – and enjoyable – conversation to have so you can learn more about and better appreciate an area of your relationship where you’re excelling.
Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, which are often at least somewhat different than their partner’s. This can be useful with you excel in an area your partner struggles with and vice versa as it makes you better equipped to avoid obstacles and overcome challenges as a team. In a relationship with neurodivergency it’s even more likely that you have different strengths and weaknesses.
However, not everyone is aware of their strengths and weaknesses or how these can be utilised. If you aren’t sure what your strengths and weaknesses are, ask yourself:
- What do you enjoy doing most and least?
- What types of things do others come to you for when they need help?
- When do you prefer to get from help from others for?
- What activities can you do effortlessly and you can lose track of time while doing them?
- Which types of responsibilities and commitments do you dread?
You and your partner can consider these individually or together if you think it would be more fun.
Next, make a list of all the things that have to get done on a regular basis, such as grocery shopping, vehicle maintenance, reaching out to relatives, deciding how you spend your free time together, and much more. Include who is responsible for what. If it’s a shared responsibility, write if you think it’s about even or if one of you takes on more of this than the other.
Because some things are more time-consuming and important than others, consider how big of a demand each item is – taking the garbage out isn’t as much of a responsibility as being responsible for laundry.
This can also be done together or individually. Compare your lists when you’re finished.
Once you know what each of you is good at and/or enjoys, you can use this information to inform who should have which responsibilities.
There will likely be things neither of you likes doing or feels good at but they still need to get done. If you’re both aware that the other dislikes it and that whoever does it isn’t happy about it, this can be recognised at the sacrifice that it is and can help each of you be more appreciative.
But division of labour doesn’t only include chores. Comforting your partner or compensating when they’re struggling are also responsibilities that can feel one-sided and lead to resentment. It’s natural for one partner to be more compassionate than the other but feeling empathy isn’t reciprocated can lead to dissatisfaction for the more empathetic partner.
Discussing roles and responsibilities someone neurodivergent can be even more valuable since they can have unusual strengths and weaknesses so you can easily be unaware of things they would like to do and/or find challenging. You could know they struggle at parties but not realise that all group conversations are difficult for them; your partner could think you like keeping shopping lists but you only do it because they don’t.
By understanding what your partner finds difficult and why, you can be more compassionate when they have to do these things while helping where you can, and they can do the same.
The more you understand about each other, the more empathetic you can be to each other’s challenges, appreciative of how you complement each other, and value the sacrifices you make for one another.
5) Have fun
When working to improve your relationship, you can forget that relationships are meant to be natural and enjoyable.
Your partner should make you feel supported in your everyday life, capable of taking on challenges, and someone you look forward to spending time with. You enjoy telling them about your life and want to learn about theirs as well.
Having difficulties in your relationship can make you unenthusiastic about being together or not feel confident that they’ll be there for in the various ways you need them to be. Instead of giving you energy as a healthy relationship should, the relationship can come to feel demanding and drain your internal resources.
This is why improving your relationship can be worth the effort it takes – making changes are difficult, and they can be even more demanding for someone with a neurodivergency, but when you have a healthy relationship, your life can improve in many different ways.
Keeping your relationship enjoyable in the face of challenges involves finding humour in the difficulties you experience and not taking things too seriously as much as possible. This can be easier if you think of yourself as being outside the relationship looking in or watching yourself on TV. It can be deeply frustrating that your partner always puts your mug in the sink even though you wanted to use it again, but would you potentially find it amusing if it were happening to someone in a sitcom?
When you’re feeling upset with your partner, remind yourself what brought you together. Remember their positive qualities and how plenty of what you can find irritating about them likely isn’t as consequential as you can imagine it to be.
Do your best to stay curious and eager to learn from one another so you never think that there’s nothing worth saying to each other.
It’s important to learn about and practice healthy communication, conflict resolution, and other relationship-building skills. But it’s also important to be able to just be with your partner, accept good enough, and ignore what you can to keep the peace because you like your partner and want to get along with them.
Keeping relationships healthy can be challenging in any circumstances, and with the added complexities of neurodivergency, there can be even more obstacles to overcome. But through each being aware of your behaviours that make the relationship more challenging than it needs to be and healthy alternatives, you and your partner have the potential to create an enjoyable and fulfilling relationship together.
To be happy in a relationship it’s necessary to accept each other as you are instead of trying to change your partner into someone else and resenting them for not becoming this person. The nature of your relationship and what you can expect from your partner might not be entirely what you want or imagined.
As you both commit to learning about and accepting each other, you can be less and less impacted by what used to be sources of disappointment, tension, and catalysts for conflicts. You can even come to find humour in their quirks and peculiarities.
All relationships require effort to create and maintain. Some can be more demanding than others, but when approached mindfully it doesn’t have to feel like work because you’re rewarded with a meaningful and fulfilling relationship.
If you’re neurodivergent and would like to have insight into how to improve your relationship with someone who is neurotypical, our next article will cover this topic.
