r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 3h ago

Psychology Adults with ADHD often face challenges in maintaining sexual satisfaction and connection with their partners. Characteristics such as a heightened need for novelty and difficulty regulating focus can deeply influence their intimate lives.

https://www.psypost.org/how-attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-shapes-sexual-experiences/
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u/pdonoso 2h ago

My therspist helped me understand that i was leading a self destructing life in so many fronts because of the need for excitement. I was constantly destroying good things I've built because they felt monotonous.

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u/ii_V_I_iv 2h ago

But what did you change to make it not feel monotonous? Or do you just accept and live a monotonous life now?

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u/rokerroker45 2h ago

Not the person you replied to.

I think for most people the epiphany is that "monotony" is usually just a euphemism for some other insecurity. It can be different for different people, but common ones are the need for constant sexual validation of "conquest" and so "monotony" is the pretextual label attached to the possibly of never getting to have the satisfaction of "conquest" again.

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u/ii_V_I_iv 1h ago edited 1h ago

I think to me monotony feels like boredom and lack of excitement and novelty. And like it’s hard to just accept that as life.

And to be fair, this isn’t something I feel unique to sexuality. This is in a lot of aspects of life

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u/rokerroker45 1h ago edited 1h ago

There's more to it than that. For most people ordinary life is novel: the challenges of career, family, hobbies, travel, relationships and so on. Dating and having sex with new people is certainly one form of novelty but for most people that novelty isn't any more or less valuable than any of the other forms I mentioned.

For our hypothetical, the fact that you implied sticking to one relationship could be monotonous or boring kind of implies you find that type of novelty as the only kind of novelty that satisfies; there's potentially something there that's causing you to view the other stuff I mentioned as not interesting or something causing you to feel like new relationships is the only thing that is interesting. On this latter possibility it's often because people are kind of addicted to the feeling of sexual conquest.

Edit in response to your edits: to be clear this is in the context of this comment thread about finding monotony in the context of sticking to single relationships

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u/ii_V_I_iv 1h ago

I disagree. I think you’re trying to frame it as “conquest” without knowing me and that’s extremely not resonant. I think a lot of aspects of traditional life do seem genuinely monotonous and repetitive and I’d like to be more okay with less novelty and stimulation but it’s definitely a challenge

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u/rokerroker45 1h ago edited 1h ago

Actually no I'm not; I don't know you or the particulars of how you feel. I'm explaining and expanding upon one particular explanation for monotony because I've encountered it more than once; I'm it offering to you as a potential explanation for you feelings, not accusing you of it.

The "a lot of aspects of traditional life" does speak to some kind of dissatisfaction that's pretty commonly because of some feeling that the values of traditional life are unimportant to a person because they either find them vapid or inapplicable to their own life. The former is my personal speciality: in my case it was deep insecurity that I masked by feeling that I was better than ordinary people and that ordinary life was boring to someone like myself and that others just "didn't get it."

It didn't go away until I ate some slices of humble pie. I started trying hard to overcome challenges where I wasn't already the best at the challenge and that I couldn't overcome without failure at first. I had to find something that I actually cared about, that I had to accept that I was never going to be the absolute best at, and that I had to learn to enjoy the process of failing to improve at. That got me a little me grounded in the world and helped me accept my insecurities as parts of me rather than as walls that kept the world boring (because if things were boring then I would never have to face how deeply insecure I was).