Buying things for a home with a partner with ADHD
July 12, 2024 1:09 PM   Subscribe

Asking people who are close to those with ADHD and those who have it: is it hard for you to focus on a task if someone adds other things into the mix? (I'm talking about a day out furniture shopping.)

My partner and I went shopping today to furnish our new apartment. There were a few things that were, according to him, top priority (a couch that would fit, a certain sized rug). We walked through the store looking for these items. Occasionally, I would spot something else that seemed nice (a lamp, a chair) and this made him extremely agitated. He wanted us to focus on the top-of-the-list things. We got in a bit of an argument in the car about how our errands went.

Sometimes he does take his ADHD medication, but sometimes he goes off it for a few weeks. I am not sure if we was on it or off it today, but my question is a more general one: it occurred to me that these different styles of shopping could have to do with our brains. For me, I can look for a couch and a rug and also notice and appreciate and think about other items without any conflict. Later I began to wonder: could it be his ADHD that made it so agitating for him that I was pointing out lamps, etc?
posted by magdalen123 to Human Relations (23 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh, man, I hate shopping. So many things! So much possibility! I want to touch all the fabrics and enjoy all the decor and try on all the cute hats and -- sorry, I'm hearing you want me to make a decision? Well, I better hope I have defined that decision in full before I left the house. Did I even need a new hat? What kind of occasions was I planning to wear it for? How many hats do I already have?
posted by Lady Li at 1:26 PM on July 12, 2024 [7 favorites]


Can I ask if you were at IKEA? As someone with ADHD, I would say that this kind of thing does not generally bother me, but shopping at IKEA is just a fucking nightmare. I don't know if that opinion is ADHD-related or not.
posted by unknowncommand at 1:27 PM on July 12, 2024 [14 favorites]


Sorry, I hit post a bit early there. To conclude, absolutely it can be decision fatigue and attention management challenges, either ADHD or within the variation of normal range. The kind of snap decision you're asking for about new items isn't easy for lots of folks, and if he's already struggling with and making an effort just to get the core tasks done, adding more tasks is going to make it all feel even more unpleasant and harder to motivate himself through.
posted by Lady Li at 1:28 PM on July 12, 2024 [5 favorites]


Best answer: I'm AuDHD, so your partner might be different, but if I'm trying to focus on something stressful (a big purchase, a task I might mess up, a high stakes decision), and someone tries to draw my attention to a different thing, I get overwhelmed. Part of what's overwhelming is my awareness of the number of times I've forgotten to get the thing I was at the store to buy because I got distracted, or the number of times I've made a really dumb mistake because I got distracted, or the number of times I've been stuck with a disappointing outcome because I got distracted during the process. It kind of makes my brain short-circuit to be focused on one thing and then have my partner bring up an unrelated or lower priority thing. Like, I have to stop the focused thing, make sense of what my partner said (many neurodivergent folks have trouble with auditory processing in this type of situation), feel thrown off by the distraction, regulate myself enough to respond appropriately to my partner, work out what to do about the distraction, and then re-focus. For me, buying a piece of furniture that is relatively expensive and needs to be a certain size would be stressful. If we were just wandering around to look at the store, I wouldn't mind having my attention called to different items, but if we were there specifically to buy a couch that fit a room and our budget, I'd be at least a little on edge and would struggle more with distractions.

(Also, furniture stores can be a sensory nightmare. Overstimulation might be a factor here.)
posted by theotherdurassister at 1:29 PM on July 12, 2024 [35 favorites]


Can I ask if you were at IKEA?

That's exactly what I was wondering. (For me it doesn't feel like an ADHD thing but more about sensory overload and fatigue - IKEA is so big, loud, crowded, and mazelike.)

I'm usually okay with the kind of scenario you describe, but if I already have a bunch of background stress, or am stressed about/laser focused on getting some specific thing done, then I can definitely get overloaded. In this case, buying couches (and potentially rugs) can be really expensive and, especially with couches, stressful because what if we choose the wrong one? Are we then stuck for years with a big, expensive, hard to move object that's not comfortable or nice to look at? If your partner is someone who feels pressure when making big decisions, buying a couch would be a classic setup for stress.
posted by trig at 1:53 PM on July 12, 2024 [2 favorites]


I can tell you when I have a party to grocery shop for, I cannot multi task and also shop for the REGULAR stuff I need on a day to day basis. I accidentally come home without what I need for the family but have everything for a party.

But I will say, being a jerk to my partner isn't something my ADHD "makes" me do and wouldn't have in that situation.

Everyone is different though, and I apologize when ADHD gets in the way of our life. It's not because "I'm wrong" but it's like bumping into someone accidentally. It doesn't hurt me to apologize and I know how frustrating my ADHD is to me! I am sure it can be frustrating to those around me.
posted by ReluctantViking at 1:54 PM on July 12, 2024 [3 favorites]


I'm ADHD, and yes, this could be related. If he is using energy to focus on "couch," it can be disregulating to suddenly switch to "rug." As a related shopping example, let's say I am going to the store for cereal, and I want two kinds, Magic Loops and Nutty Bran, and I don't know where either is on the long stretch of possibly 100+ cereals. Sometimes, I have to look for only one at a time. If I am looking for Nutty Bran, and my eyes pass over Magic Loops, I might not even notice Magic Loop because I am focusing so much on looking for Nutty Bran. This is partly because of all the cereal, and also because the grocery store is Very Stimulating.

Having said all this: I'm sorry he was agitated and wasn't able to communicate his way of thinking with you. It sounds like he lacked self-awareness. I also had a male partner, who didn't have ADHD, would who get grumpy in stores. You know what stopped it? We ran into an older male friend while shopping one day, and the guy basically said to my partner, "Get over yourself and knock it off." I don't know if you are a woman, but sometimes some people (especially men people in American culture) have this way of thinking along the lines of "Women just love shopping and spending too much money and I, a poor beleaguered man, must endure and also fight their spending habits through irritable resistance."

This might not be relevant to your situation at all! But, if he's being grumpy and irritable, and if he has a thing about shopping where his way is the "right" way, then it might not be his neurodivergence. You are doing a lot of work to understand why he was irritated at you. I hope he's doing at least as much self-reflection and has apologized for being grumpy to you. Because being ADHD isn't an excuse for being unkind to your partner.

I think it would be good to have a conversation about all this when you're both in a better place. I would try hard not to diagnose him or explain. Focus on the behavior, not the cause. It's his job to understand why and work on that, to improve his behavior.

Sometimes with our partners, we focus so much on why they behave poorly towards us because we don't want to confront (with ourselves or them) that they are behaving poorly. Sometimes the why doesn't matter, you know?
posted by bluedaisy at 2:04 PM on July 12, 2024 [15 favorites]


It really depends. If it's an activity I enjoy, if there's no time pressure (including things like the time I know it takes to become overstimulated in a busy place like ikea) and no risk of forgetting the key items or running out of time to fully analyze those key decisions, then looking at other stuff doesn't bother me at all (and I'm likely to be the one causing those distractions myself).

But if any or all of the above are not the case, then yes that kind of deviation from the plan can be anywhere from a little annoying to extremely unpleasant and upsetting, though I think that's more of an AuDHD thing than strictly ADHD. I can definitely see myself getting more and more agitated about the plan getting derailed or about being in an unpleasantly busy environment for longer than anticipated, especially if those distractions are taking a long time or uninteresting to me, and triply so if the whole experience is painfully boring (which is extra extra painful as an ADHDer).

The second scenario is more common for me, though in most cases it only reaches mild to moderate agitation.
posted by randomnity at 2:08 PM on July 12, 2024 [5 favorites]


It sounds like he expressed his needs to you (to focus on the top-of-the-list things), you ignored them, he got agitated about this, and then there was an argument in the car (you don't specify who started the argument).

Regardless of whether his processing needs were related to ADHD or not, it's important to be aware that ADHDers are estimated to have received 20,000 additional corrective or negative messages before the age of 10 in school settings alone and thus often experience extreme shame-induced reactions to criticism linked to their disability (because ADHD *is* a disability and should be accommodated as one).
posted by heatherlogan at 2:16 PM on July 12, 2024 [9 favorites]


Response by poster: Thank you for all these incredibly helpful comments so far. I am leaning a lot! I had not heard of AuDHD and I looked it up and it feels like a more accurate diagnosis than ADHD! (I will tell him about it in case he wishes to explore it, too).

No, it was not IKEA but it was a very large (factory-sized?) consignment store, different styles and prices and eras… everything from vintage teacups to massive sidebards.
posted by magdalen123 at 2:21 PM on July 12, 2024


Oh ya. Definitely overwhelming. There’s so much info to take in when making a big decision on money/couch that taking in even more information (lamp? Cost? Style? Where to put it? How to get it home?) is overwhelming and irritating for sure. Like you just want the world to stop so you can think about this one thing thoroughly. Nothing more.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:22 PM on July 12, 2024 [2 favorites]


My partner and I both have ADHD but we suspect partner is AuDHD, and while I would not react this way, my partner totally would. Theotherdurassister's description nails it.
posted by throwitawayurthegarbageman at 2:46 PM on July 12, 2024


Best answer: It depends but mostly yes. When I'm in a "task-oriented mindset," so to speak, it's difficult for me to be exposed to distractions because all it takes sometimes is one distraction for my train of thought to derail. Which might not always sound like a big deal for a neurotypical person ("don't we all do that?") but can in fact be far more devastating to a person with ADHD. For one, it's harder for us to regain the momentum we lose, and two, we often carry a lot of deep emotional baggage related to forgetfulness, distraction, and mistakes.

Switching tasks, even momentarily, can make us feel thrown off in the present while triggering emotions and even trauma that are buried deep within our body.

Putting that into context, many folks with ADHD have a long and complicated history of being criticized and shamed for making mistakes during childhood and beyond. We tend to develop a higher-than-average hypersensitivity to "fucking up" because we associate fuck-ups (and the potential for fucking up) with extreme shame and failure. For many of us, it inadvertently becomes a part of our identity.

This can translate to said person with ADHD growing agitated and irritated if they're distracted in the middle of a task they want to focus on. Even when it's not rational, our mind subconsciously associates distractions from "focus time" with a high risk of relapsing into shame/failure.

Having said that, ADHD explains these behaviors but it's possible to find ways to manage them, as well as find ways to minimize their impact on our loved ones. I know my triggers, and I proactively work to avoid them or have a plan for how I will deal with them should they arise. I don't know about your husband, but for me, I have to take my ADHD meds every day at the same time if I want any hope of normality, consistency, and routine. That's the starting point. Communicating his needs to you in advance, and being open about what he needs while finding a way to compromise with you ("Hey spouse, I know you're excited to shop for our home needs but it's hard for me to browse a lot of different things at once. Would it be okay if we focus on finding a couch first, and then circle back to the lamps and rugs afterward?") is part of growing and finding a way to live a happy and successful life (with happy and successful relationships) with ADHD. So, he has to do his part, too, but I'm glad you were interested enough to come here and ask!

One other thing I want to add...the most useful metaphor for ADHD I've come across is this: Having ADHD is like driving a really cool, intriguing, powerful car with terrible gas mileage. It's not that our car (brain) lacks gas (dopamine), it's that our car is not energy inefficient and burns through gasoline much faster than the average person's car does. And once we run out, we don't really get to "fill up" until the next day. It's still an awesome car to have! But there are different limitations.
posted by nightrecordings at 3:09 PM on July 12, 2024 [10 favorites]


Does he like shopping? I know several people who don't have ADHD but who find shopping uninteresting or fatiguing and I would definitely expect them to get annoyed in this scenario. If he's that kind of person, he probably would have seen it this way: He thought this was a clearly defined trip with 2 objectives and that as soon as you either bought what you were looking for or concluded the store didn't have it, you would be able to leave the store (a moment he was looking forward to the way you might look forward to the end of a workout.) But then you seemed to be turning it into an open-ended thing with no clear end point and a potentially unlimited number of things you might want to look at. Even if you were only looking at things you happened to walk by on your way to your objective, every time you stopped to consider something and talk about it, it was moving that anticipated end point further into the future. So it could be an ADHD thing or it could just be a "doesn't enjoy shopping" thing.
posted by Redstart at 3:20 PM on July 12, 2024 [10 favorites]


I have ADHD, but when I’m flustered, I can easily say to my partner “I really want to get the couch done first. Mind if I skip ahead and look at those and we meet back up for meatballs in 20 minutes and discuss what we’re seeing? Take photos of what you like!” My ADHD doesn’t negate their right to shop or do whatever as they prefer, and it’s mine to own.

I think it is normal and healthy to want to go on shopping trips in a way that is fun for everyone, and I applaud you to the extent this question is asking how to make things truly fun for everyone next time. But you mention conflict and argument and kind of imply that his preferred way of shopping is something that must be fully accommodated, and that is a different problem (and not one that necessarily follows from ADHD).
posted by moosetracks at 3:49 PM on July 12, 2024 [6 favorites]


Best answer: I have ADHD and tasks and chores can be so much effort.

It takes a lot to get started, if something distracts me during it it becomes 10 times harder and my brain is constantly throwing distractions at me.
If someone else with different priorities gets involved it can make a task that was already difficult draining and painful.

And the more drained I am the less energy I have for masking (hiding agitation) and emotional regulation (being able to calm down to avoid an argument).

In my case I definitely would've struggled in this situation, especially if I felt I had tried to express my needs and they'd been ignored.
posted by Laura_J at 3:59 PM on July 12, 2024 [5 favorites]


I have ADHD and I get stressed out and annoyed in big stores because they're ugly, so I feel kind of gross and adrift in them. I don't mind "all the things", I mind the green-tinted lighting and the dimness. I actually enjoy "all the things" in big stores that have windows or skylights or at least spotlights. So for me many parts of Ikea are fine- I like all the little rooms to look at, dislike the big bed and kitchen cabinet area.
Walmart is worse, and Home Depot and Costco make me agitated. I like things that are human-scale.
Also, I always have to pee and am avoiding the gross bathrooms so I get impatient at inefficiency.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 4:11 PM on July 12, 2024


As a parent of a young kid with ADHD, I'm noticing that a lot of advice and tips and therapy are focusing on "get your 3 tasks done, do not get distracted, and then you can play" so perhaps that's how he has gotten used to adulting -- knowing that if he doesn't buy those 2 main things he needs and instead starts looking at other things, he will lose focus and it will be so much harder to get back to the tasks.

As a partner to someone who hates shopping, I'm agreeing with whoever above said that maybe he wanted to just get the things you NEEDED and got agitated when this trip to IKEA was starting to get longer and longer. IKEA is definitely overwhelming! I love it there but I know people who hate shopping there because of the whole experience (nothing to do with "disposable furniture").
posted by dabadoo at 5:58 PM on July 12, 2024 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I'll join the crowd that I would find this situation pretty challenging (for similar reasons as others) and have lost my cool in similar situations.

Over time I've gotten better at understanding and communicating my needs in these scenarios, and being more explicit. But it isn't just a preference I can set aside, that I can choose to not find it hard.

It has also taken me a while to learn to sense when I'm getting overwhelmed before it gets to the point of being outwardly agitated and at risk of saying something rude. And a long time to identify the situations that are going to be a problem, and find accommodations that help (like e.g. researching ahead of time, making notes, having a list).

But for me, if I am focused on something important and challenging (and unfortunately I seem to find things like picking furniture inordinately challenging), having someone propose other unrelated decisions to make in the middle would never not be a drain on my ability to tolerate the situation. I am also always conscious of the bandwidth that the main decision will take and resistant to things that take up that energy, out of fear of finding the main search and decision too overwhelming and not succeeding at that. I would probably suggest to that person that they take pictures of those things so we can bring them up later at an opportune moment, for example.

If it is AuDHD, a common trait is that having a routine or plan disrupted can be distressing, and your partner might have thought through this trip and have a particular approach to shopping that works, finding it hard when that is changed. I also tend to need some time to decompress, and it would be tough after an overwhelming experience to have to talk it through right away.

It is what it is. I sincerely wish I was not like this, but the best for me is if my partner can give me space and follow my lead. And as you go through more of these experiences, you might find more ways to help each other making the best use of both of your strengths.
posted by lookoutbelow at 6:44 PM on July 12, 2024 [9 favorites]


I have never been diagnosed with ADHD but I fucking hate shopping. It is not fun for me it is a stressful and emotional chore. Shopping with others is more stressful for me because I want to incorporate their interests and tastes and priorities, but I'm already stressed trying to find the thing that I can tolerate, and adding someone else's needs adds complexity that is emotionally charged to the decision making. There is variation, but I often much prefer to stay focused on my specific goal when I enter a large store to buy something specific.
posted by latkes at 8:36 PM on July 12, 2024 [5 favorites]


You know, thinking about other people I know who have had this kind of reaction before, they absolutely don't have ADHD and I would be extremely surprised if they were autistic. What they are is stressed and overloaded by life, and also possessed of a preference for just getting stuff done instead of my ADHD-ish tendency towards flitting around and leaving things unfinished. When they're set on some task and I come along and make moves to expand the scope in various ways (like saying "hey, let's look at lamps too!") they sometimes feel like my distractability is interfering with their general ability to not get distracted and actually get stuff crossed of their list, which is a priority for them because there's so much they need to do and be responsible for. (And there's also usually some baggage, like they get more annoyed because this is not the first time it's felt to them like I'm distracting them from some task and they're tired of it.)

In other words your partner's reaction might be an ADHD thing, or an AuDHD thing, or another type of stress thing, or a personality trait/preference that lots of as-far-as-science-currently-knows-"neurotypical" people have that stems from other things and that you might see as rigid, or which you might see as effective for accomplishing goals. You say "it occurred to me that these different styles of shopping could have to do with our brains" and, you know, they could and they could not. Our understanding of brains, and our data on really specific behaviors and personality traits, is nowhere near the point of being able to explain how much our behavior, thinking, and emotions are dictated by our wiring and how much they're informed by other factors that we don't really know how to measure or observe.

(If someone posted a question saying "my partner and I went to a store to buy two specific big-ticket items, and they kept getting distracted by smaller items; they have ADHD; do you think this might be related?" there would probably be a lot of answers saying "yes, my ADHD can take that form". You apparently don't have ADHD, and so your behavior didn't stem from it - but if you did have ADHD that exact same behavior might be attributed to it.)


Given the data points in my own life, I don't think this kind of behavior correlates directly with ADHD or autism; in your partner's case it might play a role, and it might not. Ultimately, I think the thing that's actually important is for both of you to know that this is how he is and this is how you are, and figure out ways for both of you to adjust your behaviors in ways that are fair towards you both.
posted by trig at 5:22 AM on July 13, 2024 [9 favorites]


When I shop for groceries I can shop for one and two quarter people. I have to prioritize one family member's needs, buying them staples that the other two can also eat, and then add a few standard favourite items for each of the the other two. To make it more fair I try to switch which person is the focus of a given trip, so that each one of them has a chance to get first priority.

I cannot shop for groceries for two people. I have tried many times. If I end up with two lists, one for each person, both of them will be missing salient items and the third person will be getting nothing at all. I will be in executive overload and unable to figure out what is missing and what else I could even get to make up the oversights. Someone will have all the fixings for tuna sandwiches to take to work except bread, and someone else will have no meat and I will buy six packages of cookies out of desperation so they at least have snacks and still somehow get the kind that nobody actually likes. One of us will go through the week eating nothing but macaroni and margarine.

While my experience is not an exact match to your partner, I would say that yes, as soon as your partner signaled that he didn't want to look at end tables and lamps, your continuing to do so, probably flooded his executive capacity and it was game over. Of course, I find myself also suspecting that your inability to stop trying to look at end tables and bookcases with him was your own ADD manifesting. The expedition was doomed.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:41 AM on July 13, 2024 [1 favorite]


No, it was not IKEA but it was a very large (factory-sized?) consignment store, different styles and prices and eras… everything from vintage teacups to massive sidebards.

I have ADHD.

I do like browsing in these sorts of stores. So many things to see! Fun place to spend time with someone just looking around at things, seeing what catches the other person's eye, etc. A fun and casual date idea.

I've also gone to this sort of store on a mission to buy a large couch for a work event. (This isn't a "teapot manufacturing" stand in for another item, literally a couch which there are usually less available than a lot of other items) Needed a specific look and then after a few days the couch would get donated somewhere, but on a deadline to find a particular look. Have actually gone through this process multiple times. Sometimes several other people have come who have strong feelings about how the couch will look, maybe someone has a truck to put the couch in. It is not fun or relaxing to be on a deadline to buy a couch at a consignment store when the couch needs to meet certain requirements, and I would have been very annoyed if other people started spending lots and lots of time looking at lamps and things that weren't part of the plan for the store that day, because I would have other work I needed to get to, I don't have all day to look at cool stuff at the store before we pick out a couch, even if I would enjoy looking at the things in other circumstances. The goal is a couch and it's not going to be good if we don't get a couch.

Note that in these cases, the size of the couch wasn't super important because it was going in a large open area.

Maybe you were not on a deadline to get a couch, but you probably both want a couch to relax on at home, and might not have time to go through a large store like this again right away. So that's sort of like a deadline. Or even if you weren't on a deadline, maybe you find something just right but you know if you want to take time to decide it might be gone if you come back next week.

But, that doesn't mean it's appropriate to act badly or argue just because someone acted a way I didn't like at the store. You don't really describe what "agitated" looks like or who started the argument though. Sometimes agitated might just look like "lets get back to looking at couches", which there isn't anything wrong with trying to stay focused on your mission instead of getting distracted by other things.

One the other hand, I'm also the sort of person that would never deliberately try to look for specific furniture that I very much wanted to find as soon as possible for my own apartment at a consignment store. The selection is so hit or miss they might not have what I want, and instead of a couch that won't be quite right but is going away after a few days, I'm going to be pickier about what I want to get and they probably won't have quite what I want. A couch of a very specific size and a rug of a very specific size at that sort of store just sounds like an awful shopping experience looking through all the wrong items, not a fun browse through random weird stuff.

Despite that, if someone I was living with actually brought me to a store on the sort of couch mission you were talking about, and started looking at chairs and lamps and such, I'd probably find some really cool chairs and lamps and giant floor pillows and a weird sculpture and get really attached to a new vision for a completely different direction of living room interior design where we actually shouldn't get a couch after all and it's going to be to inconvenient to get a couch that's the right size and needs multiple people and truck to move it and we are doing something different, and no couch that's no longer a priority a couch was a silly idea and I regret making it a priority, this new idea is much better! I would say something you find very persuasive in the moment. And I would spend all my living room money on things that were not a couch and we would not have a couch. But our living room would look awesome! Probably the person I was living with would bring up every time someone came over that it is my fault that we don't have a couch, and we would eventually break up over this.

I would insist on keeping the cool chair.

But anyhow, have you considered shopping for furniture at a place where you can look online and see dimensions of the pieces, maybe even a platform that has a search function for specific sizes? Where you can shop without the pressure of needing to buy something right away if you like it? It seems like buying expensive furniture under pressure is probably more likely to be frustraning for both of you.
posted by yohko at 7:31 PM on July 16, 2024 [1 favorite]


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