 Gender
Research
By Kathleen G. Nadeau
The Impact of ADHD upon Marriage
Men report more negative feelings
than women
about marriage to a spouse with ADHD.
Dr. Arthur Robin and Eleanor Payson have recently
published preliminary results of their research into the impact
of ADHD upon the marital relationships. They created the “Marital
Impact Checklist” consisting of 34 statements of potentially
problematic behaviors that might be exhibited by a spouse with ADHD.
Some examples of items include:
- Doesn’t respond when spoken
to
- Poor task completion
- Pays bills late
- Poor time management
- Can’t get things done
unless there’s an absolute deadline
- Leaves a mess
- Doesn’t remember being
told things
- Takes out frustrations on spouse
Their research involved couples where either the wife,
husband had ADHD. Each ADHD partner was asked to rate his or her
own behavior in three ways:
- Does this behavior occur in
your marriage?
- If this behavior does occur,
how unimportant, unloved, ignored does it make the non-ADHD spouse
feel?
- If this behavior occurs, how
negatively does it impact the marriage on a scale from 1-5?
Dr. Robbins and Ms. Payson studied 80 couples –
because many were recruited through ADDvance Magazine, in
over half of the couples (56%) the wife was the spouse with ADHD.
When sex comparisons were made, some interesting results
were reported. There were no significant differences in self-ratings
between male and female ADHD spouses, however there were large differences
in spouse ratings by the non-ADHD spouse, with husbands of
ADHD wives reporting a much greater negative impact than wives of
ADHD husbands. Robins and Payson interpret this finding to suggest
that “sex role issues contribute far more to the level of dissatisfaction
in a marriage when the female partner has ADHD than when the male
partner has ADHD.” In other words, non-ADHD husbands were much
less tolerant of their wives’ ADHD patterns in comparison to
wives of ADHD husbands. The researchers commented that their findings
seem to support Sari Solden’s writings about women with ADHD
in which she suggests that ADHD impedes women, much more than men,
in fulfilling their sex role expectations in modern Western society.
- For the full article, readers
may refer to :
- Robbins, A. & Payson, E.
The Impact of ADHD on Marriage. ADHD Report, Volume 10,
#3, 9-11, 14.
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