I’m 23F, in my first serious relationship with 23M, and I can’t tell if our neurodivergent dynamic is fixable or if I’m too attached to leave
Sorry in advance for the long post!
My boyfriend and I are both 23. We’ve been together for about 3.5 years, and this is our first serious relationship.
I’m autistic, and he has ADHD. I think this affects us a lot. I need consistency, clarity, follow-through, emotional presence, and reassurance through actions. He struggles with avoidance, procrastination, distraction, and sometimes seems emotionally unavailable or passive. I often feel like I am asking for basic effort and communication, but he experiences it as pressure or criticism.
I frequently feel like my needs are not being met. I want to feel chosen, considered, prioritized, and emotionally safe. Instead, I often feel like I have to explain the same things over and over. He may care about me, but a lot of the time it does not translate into the kind of initiative I need.
I also struggle with rigidity and black-and-white thinking. When something feels wrong, incoherent, or disappointing, I have a hard time not seeing it as evidence that we are fundamentally incompatible. I can spiral into thoughts like “he will never meet my needs,” “we are not right for each other,” or “I don’t respect him anymore" (this translates into every single relationship I have, not just with him btw). I know some of this may be intensified by autism, anxiety, depression, or obsessive relationship thoughts, but I also don’t want to dismiss my feelings as irrational when there are real unmet needs.
For context, for the first three years of our relationship, we were long distance because he is from my hometown and I was away for university. The distance caused issues, and there were definitely periods of disconnection. There were also times when he was more hesitant to come visit because of the distance, real-life commitments, exhaustion, and life getting in the way. But, in the end, he came. He made the effort throughout the relationship, not just at the beginning. That matters to me because it makes the relationship feel like something that was built with real care and intention.
He also knows my whole family. We’ve traveled together, including internationally with my family. He has been part of major memories and milestones. Now I live at home again, which is normal in my culture, so he is also part of my family life in a very real way. Because of all of this, I have a very hard time emotionally disentangling from him. I don’t know how to separate from someone who is so woven into my life, my family, and my history.
He is also genuinely kind and patient in ways that are very important to me. I grew up with animals, and he did not. He was never really an “animal person,” but he has basically adopted my two cats as his own and calls them his “daughters.” He is also very patient with my family pets. He does not complain when my two dogs sleep in bed with us, for example. These things matter because they show care, adaptability, and tenderness.
That is part of why this is so confusing. This is not a situation where he is simply careless or cruel. He can be very loving, patient, and devoted. But our day-to-day dynamic has become hard.
Lately, I have also been spiraling into depression. I used to be more social, but because of my depression and natural introversion, I haven’t been going out much. My world has become smaller, and maybe that has made the relationship feel even more central. I feel emotionally exhausted, stuck, and scared that I am losing parts of myself.
At the same time, I feel like no one knows me better than he does. I’m on the low-support-needs end of the autism spectrum, but that often means I am constantly masking around people. I am always performing some version of myself. Even with friends and family, I don’t think anyone has known me as deeply as he has. He is the first person I have felt I could truly be myself with.
That makes this even harder. I am a difficult person to really know, and probably a difficult person to be around sometimes. I don’t mean that in a self-hating way, but realistically, I know I am intense, rigid, introverted, and sensitive. With him, I have felt seen in a way I don’t usually feel with other people.
This has made me feel conflicted. Sometimes I feel like I am losing respect, attraction, and emotional warmth toward him because I feel chronically disappointed or unmet. When I feel like he is passive, inconsistent, or not acting according to the values I expect in a partner, something in me shuts down. I can become cold, resentful, or even disgusted. Then, when things calm down, I can feel love for him again. That back-and-forth is confusing.
His ADHD also complicates things because I don’t want to be unfair to him for having ADHD, but I also don’t want to spend my life feeling like I have to compensate for his lack of follow-through. I feel like I am constantly trying to decide what is neurodivergence, what is immaturity, what is incompatibility, and what is simply him not trying enough.
The hardest part is that I don’t know if I want someone else. I don’t even know if I want to try to find this kind of connection with someone else. I don’t know if I could ever find what I have with him again, especially because feeling truly known is so rare for me.
Maybe I don’t want a different relationship. Maybe I just want him, but I want us to be okay again.
I’m (re)starting therapy and want to work on my side of this, especially my rigidity, anxiety, depressive spiraling, and difficulty tolerating disappointment. But I also want to be honest about the relationship itself. I don’t want to pathologize myself into accepting a dynamic where I feel chronically unmet. He is also starting therapy, which makes me feel like there may still be room for both of us to work on ourselves and on the relationship.
How do you tell the difference between relationship anxiety/rigidity and genuine incompatibility? Can a relationship like this become healthy if both people are neurodivergent but have very different needs? And how do you know whether you’re staying because there is still something worth saving, or because the person is so woven into your life that leaving feels impossible?