Typically I'm hopefully optimistic and never give up, but lately hope has felt like poison

@SojourningScribbler

honestly i am glad you got your diagnosis and you may be right that items effected your long term relationships ... unfortunately when you are on the other side it is not the same ....

my spouses mother had ticks and issues and i never thought anything of it .....Now as my spouse ages strange behaviors and ticks we see it may be some sort of genetic condition but his often weird OCD type and no attention frustrations it caused would not be helped by a real diagnosis ...... looking back i wish i could excuse things and see it might be something he could not help ....... but the damage is done ........ have you been able to have a deep discussion about how the diagnosis changed your thoughts on things?

Unfortunately that is the greatest deterrent or inhibitor of understanding and development, that communication doesn't happen at all currently. So no conversation is taking place about anything that I've learned.

It certainly has an impact on both sides. Not simply for myself and the behaviors that it influences but also it influences the responses and interpretations of the non ADHD partner. They already have their own perception of what you do and say but if you do manage to have that conversation that we have both referred to about these insights it has the ability to change another's perspective if they're open to it.

So in some small way at least, I hold out hope that someday communication might resume and an opportunity might present itself for understanding and renewed compassion on the basis of newly gained insights. In the greatest of ways I am the same person I have always been however, in significant other ways, I'm not at all the same. So I've become a new person, a new formula, one that requires a new way of responding to and thinking about me.

And the only way that becomes possible is if the person that she knew (of me) is erased and she takes the opportunity to know the new person.

The most likely instance in which that is possible is if she too let's old things pass away within herself and becomes a new person with a greater sense of understanding and self knowledge and self love to become that refumilated version of herself with its core intact so that perhaps we need again as new and improved acquaintances with the feeling of being old souls who might even be soulmates.

But that's the idea of commitment in the face of challenge and inconvenience and discomfort, that old things need to be torn down and new things need to take their place so you both become someone new.