Boredom in a Relationship: Is It ADHD or the Relationship?

Sometimes a person asks themselves a question. Sometimes out loud, most of the time without saying anything at all.

"Everything in my life is fine. There is someone who loves me. But for a while now there has been a restlessness inside me. Is this ADHD, or am I no longer happy in this relationship?"

No one can answer this question from the outside. I cannot either. But opening the question up a little may make it easier to find the answer.

First I want to say this: asking this question is not a betrayal. It is part of trying to listen to yourself honestly.

Boredom is more frequent in ADHD

Boredom looks like a simple emotion. But it is a subject studied in detail in psychology, and it is defined as wanting to be interested in something and failing to be.

In an early study with university students, the boredom proneness subscales and daytime sleepiness turned out to be among the variables that best predicted adult attention deficit scores (Kass et al., 2003).

A more recent study looked at this relationship more closely. When young adults with and without ADHD traits were compared, boredom proneness was found to be higher by a very large margin in the group with ADHD traits. The researchers also showed that performance on attention control and working memory tasks explained part of this difference. The part explained is small, but meaningful: part of the problem is less about failing to find something interesting and more about having trouble keeping attention on something and working with it in the mind (Orban et al., 2026).

This finding tells me something important. In ADHD, boredom may have less to do with how little stimulation there is outside and more to do with how the attention system inside works. In other words, the same outside environment can feel more boring to someone with ADHD.

There is a nearby entry in the glossary: boredom intolerance. I described where it comes from in more detail in the article stimulation seeking.

In ADHD, the restlessness sometimes comes not from inside the relationship but from inside attention. But the feeling itself does not tell you which one it comes from.

A long relationship, a hard environment in terms of stimulation

A long-term relationship is full of good things: trust, familiarity, routine. But many of these good things are things an ADHD attention system does not take an interest in by itself.

The novelty of the early period, the uncertainty, learning something new in every conversation. These decrease over time. I talked about how this decrease is connected to the hyperfocus at the start of a relationship in the article love and hyperfocus.

What comes after is repetition. The same dinner, the same series, the same Saturday. Repetition is one of the things a person with ADHD tolerates least.

Here I notice something contradictory about myself. I get bored of repetition, but I also know that repetition does me good. Sleeping at the same hour, working in the same place, taking the same morning walk; these give a scattered mind a skeleton to hold on to. The routine of a relationship can be a skeleton like that too. The place the restlessness comes from and the place the trust comes from can be the same. Perhaps the point is not getting rid of the routine; perhaps it is keeping the routine and opening small gaps within it to breathe.

For this reason the following possibility needs to be taken seriously: when you get bored in a relationship with ADHD, part of that restlessness may be independent of the relationship itself. You may feel the same restlessness in a job, a hobby, a city. The hobby graveyard is the most innocent example of this.

But the restlessness should not be belittled either

I do not want to take the easy way out here. Saying "it comes from ADHD, it will pass" would be a kind of mistake too.

In a long-term follow-up study with married couples, people who in the seventh year of marriage more often reported the feeling that "our marriage has settled into a routine, we always do the same things, we don't do anything exciting together" were found to be markedly less satisfied with their marriages nine years later. The researchers found that this effect worked partly through a decrease in the feeling of closeness (Tsapelas et al., 2009).

This study is not about ADHD and does not examine participants with ADHD separately. But it clearly shows this: restlessness in a relationship is not a harmless feeling. When it is brushed aside, it can erode closeness and satisfaction over time.

So two things can be true at the same time. ADHD may make boredom easier. And this restlessness, whatever its source, may be a sign that the relationship needs attention.

Questions that help tell them apart

These are not a definitive test. They are a few questions you can hold on to while looking inside yourself.

Is the restlessness only in the relationship, or everywhere? If in recent months your job, your friendships and your hobbies have felt boring to you in the same way, the source of this restlessness may be somewhere more general than the relationship. Sometimes it is even a sign of mood rather than of the attention system. If there is a long-lasting lack of drive and loss of pleasure, it would be good to talk about it with a specialist.

Is it restlessness, or is something missing? "I want something to happen" and "something is missing in this relationship" are different sentences. The first wants novelty. The second may be wanting something deeper, like closeness, being understood, respect.

What happens when the restlessness is talked about? When you tell your partner you want to try something new, do you get a response? When you do something together, does the restlessness lift temporarily? If it does, the problem may lie less in the relationship itself than in its routine.

Has this feeling come before? If the same restlessness came at the same point in past relationships, jobs, pursuits, you may be looking at a pattern. Recognizing the pattern gives you a chance to do something different this time.

Bringing novelty into the relationship

The finding I like most here is this. In a series of studies with long-term couples, in a questionnaire and a door-to-door survey, couples who said they did "exciting" activities together were found to have higher relationship satisfaction, and this link was partly explained by less boredom. In three laboratory experiments, couples who did only a seven-minute new and mildly exciting task reported a bigger increase in relationship quality than couples who did an ordinary task (Aron et al., 2000).

Seven minutes. This feels very hopeful to me.

The novelty seeking of someone with ADHD will flow somewhere. The question is where it will flow. A few things I find worth trying:

Things done together for the first time. A neighborhood you have never visited, a dish you have never cooked, a game neither of you knows. It does not have to be expensive or big. What matters is that it is new to both of you.

Small changes inside the routine. Taking the same evening walk on a different route. Taking turns choosing the snack while watching the same series. The aim does not have to be removing the repetition entirely; adding a small unknown to it is enough.

Talking about the need for novelty. There is a world of difference between "I'm bored of you" and "I have a very strong need for novelty, would you like to meet it together?" The second invites your partner not to a problem but to a project.

Do not make big decisions from restlessness. In ADHD, restlessness can feel unbearable and, combined with impulsivity, can push toward sudden decisions: leaving all at once, seeking excitement outside the relationship, taking a step that is hard to take back. Not making a big decision at the moment the restlessness is most intense, observing the feeling for a few weeks and talking to a specialist if needed prevents steps you would regret. I described this face of impulsivity in the article impulsivity in ADHD.

I should add one more thing: bringing novelty into the relationship does not solve other problems in the relationship. If there are unspoken resentments, an unequal load or distrust, a new activity only covers them over for a while. If you notice that something like this lies beneath the restlessness, it may be more right to have that conversation before increasing the excitement; if needed, together with a couples therapist.

The question I ask myself

While writing this article I also had to accept something: not every restlessness has an answer. Sometimes the restlessness just comes and after a while goes. Trying to solve it sometimes makes it bigger. Learning to bear a little boredom is a skill in itself for someone with ADHD.

For me restlessness has always been an alarm: something is wrong, change something, go somewhere. For many years I obeyed this alarm right away. I changed jobs, changed subjects, changed pursuits.

Now when I hear the alarm I try to do something else: wait a little and ask. What does this restlessness want? To run away, or to renew something?

Sometimes the answer really is to leave. But most of the time it tells me that I need to look a little more consciously at a place where my attention does not go on its own.