Enhancing ADHD Intimacy: 3 Rules for a Lifetime of Great Sex
ADHD symptoms can crush a couple’s sex life. Ignite passion and strengthen connections with these tips.
Every couple endures challenges, but a couple that includes one ADHD partner may face a few more. Obviously, it’s important to learn collaborative ways to deal with the demands of adult life. But what about the fun stuff? Aren’t you also supposed to enjoy each other and fool around sometimes?
Couples who have additional struggles may especially need that intimate connection to maintain goodwill during those inevitable ADHD moments. Here’s what to do — and not do.
How to Have Better Sex in ADHD Relationships
1. Avoid extremes. When a person with ADHD is defensive or minimizes reasonable requests, their partner may become controlling or retreat into resentful silence. If the non-ADHD partner criticizes the ADHD partner because they haven’t met expectations, the ADHD partner may become oppositional or passive. You want to avoid these extremes.
[Free Download: Manage ADHD’s Impact on Your Relationship]
ADHD doesn’t invent new problems; it just exacerbates the universal ones. Every couple has to negotiate different preferences or ways of doing things, but the heat is turned up when one partner isn’t managing their ADHD well and the other takes on the role of caregiver. As one respondent wrote in my survey on ADHD and relationships, “Parent-child dynamics in adults are a sex killer.”
If you don’t feel like an equal, or even on the same team, you may be less interested in sex with your partner. Generosity and excitement begin to fizzle and then you feel like roommates (boring).
2. Use sex to foster connection. In my research, I have found that those with ADHD are generally more interested in sex and more influenced by sexual stimuli. This totally makes sense. People with ADHD tend to have a harder time filtering out and resisting what is interesting in the moment.
This sexual eagerness can be positive in a long-term relationship when the couple is generally getting along well and sex is a fun, connecting experience. After all, every couple needs at least one person to initiate sex and to keep it from being the last thing that happens. Also, that ADHD quest for novelty can keep things exciting over the years.
[Watch: Are Symptoms, Medications Affecting Your Love Life?]
3. Prioritize fun. For couples with ADHD, three things are inextricably linked: your relationship, your sex life, and how well the partner with ADHD is managing symptoms. If you want one of these to be better, then you probably need to work on the other two. Working on your relationship and sex life will help you and your partner feel supportive of each other, which will lead to a willingness to manage ADHD more effectively. This positivity will lead couples to not only make more time for sex, but it also create more good feelings, playfulness, and generosity — so the sex is even better.
This is not just about the physical act of sex. It’s about feeling that your partner has your back and can handle it when you have an imperfect moment. It’s about giving and receiving generosity. It’s about rising above the mundane demands of adult life and prioritizing your time together. It’s about really wanting to be with this person. And that’s why you’re together, isn’t it?
Enhancing ADHD Intimacy: Next Steps
- Watch: ADHD and Sex — Building Focus and Attention for Intimacy
- Read: Can an ADHD Diagnosis Save a Relationship?
- Read: When Both Partners Are Diagnosed — Understanding the Other’s ADHD
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