ADHD and Relationships 101: I make sudden decisions and my partner says they can't trust me

Let's say that on a Tuesday evening you see a job listing. In another city, a job exactly like the one you've been dreaming of. You finish the application by midnight, and by morning you have told your manager you're leaving your current job. You tell your partner about it over dinner, full of excitement. There's no joy on their face. There's a silence, then this sentence: "You didn't even ask me. I can never know your next move."

This article is part of the ADHD and Relationships 101 series, and it looks for an answer to one of the questions that carries the "but I didn't do anything bad" feeling most strongly. Because most of the time nothing bad really was done. The decision may even be sensible. The problem isn't the decision itself, but how and with whom it was made.

There's a reason this is so common

When people think of ADHD, distractibility comes to mind first. Impulsivity, on the other hand, is usually associated with childhood, with interrupting, with not being able to wait in line. In adulthood the same trait moves to a quieter but bigger place: decisions. Quitting overnight, renting a flat over a weekend, buying a last-minute plane ticket, signing up for a course and taking on installments. In the glossary this is called a sudden decision: making a long-term choice in an instant.

A meta-regression analysis that brought together laboratory studies on decision-making covers 37 studies and roughly 2,400 participants. ADHD groups made riskier decisions than control groups; the difference was between small and medium (Dekkers et al., 2016). A gambling task in a lab and a decision to move in real life aren't the same thing. But this finding says that what you are going through isn't a personal weakness, but a tendency seen again and again in ADHD.

Why it happens: the gas before the brake

In Russell Barkley's model, at the center of ADHD lies difficulty with inhibition, that is, with being able to stop an incoming response for a moment. This momentary pause buys time for the other executive functions to kick in: remembering the past, weighing the future, taking someone else into account. When the pause is short, behavior is shaped more by the stimulus in front of you than by the distant consequence (Barkley, 1997). I had explained this in more detail in the article what is impulsivity.

With decisions, one more thing gets added to this. A meta-analysis that brought together 21 independent studies found that people with ADHD discount delayed rewards more than control groups do; the difference was of medium size (Jackson and MacKillop, 2016). If I translate it into everyday language: the excitement of the new job is today, while the exhaustion of moving and your partner's hurt are a month from now. The scales tip toward today.

A few familiar pieces pile on top of this:

• Novelty seeking. The new is the brain's favorite stimulus. A new city, a new project, a new plan. Novelty seeking sometimes speaks louder than the real reason for the decision.
• Emotion regulation. In a period when you're bored or overwhelmed, a big change gives quick relief. In that moment the decision looks like an exit door.
• Time blindness. "Later" isn't felt. The effect the decision will have a month from now looks pale next to the excitement of the moment.

As someone who runs her own business, I also know the good side of deciding quickly. Sometimes an opportunity really is open only for a short time. The issue isn't speed itself. The issue is what happens where that speed touches someone else's life.

What trust is actually built on

When your partner says "I can't trust you," they are most likely not saying they find you a liar or unfaithful. They mean something else.

A classic study of trust in close relationships describes trust in three parts. The first is predictability: being able to predict a partner's concrete behaviors based on past experience. The second is dependability: the belief that the partner is someone you can rely on even in moments of risk. The third is faith: the confidence that in an uncertain future, too, the partner will look out for you (Rempel et al., 1985). The authors think of these parts as a sequence built one on top of the other: predictability forms the ground.

Sudden decisions shake exactly this ground. Your partner loves you, and may well believe in your good intentions. But they can't predict what you'll do tomorrow. And making plans for the future with a person they can't predict feels hard to them. The sentence "I can't trust you" often means "I can't predict you."

Knowing this gives me hope, because predictability is something that can be built more through routine than through personality. You don't need to change your character. It's enough to make visible where your decisions pass through and in what order.

How it looks through your partner's eyes

You live events one by one: a listing, an opportunity, a burst of excitement. Your partner, though, sees a pattern. A job last year, the idea of moving this year, a holiday booked last month without telling them.

The sentences that might go through your partner's mind look something like these:

• "They do something that affects my life without asking me."
• "I'll find out about the next big change over dinner too."
• "If I say no, I'll be the boring one hitting the brakes, and if I do say it, nothing will change anyway."

In a study with adults with ADHD and their spouses, how the spouses compensated for their partners' difficulties had been examined through clinical interviews (Eakin et al., 2004). Sudden decisions are an exhausting form of this compensation: one person decides, the other tries to clean up the consequences. Over time your partner may come to feel not like a partner, but like someone who manages the aftermath of decisions. Past a certain point, this dynamic starts to look like a parent-child relationship, and it is heavy for both sides.

Which decisions are shared, which are yours

The first job is accepting that not every decision carries the same weight. You deciding on your own what to have for dinner won't shake anyone's trust. But a decision that affects the shared calendar, shared money or the place you live in together is in another category.

If I were you, I would sort decisions into three groups:

Type of decision	Example	Rule
Your decision	A hobby, your own spare money, your own day	Without asking anyone
A decision to give notice about	A weekend plan with friends, a new responsibility at work	A short message before acting
A shared decision	Changing jobs, moving, spending above the threshold, a shared holiday	Wait 24 hours, talk together
A decision that's hard to reverse	Quitting, a lease, a large debt, getting a pet	Wait a week, decide together

Fill in this table together on a calm day. Which decision goes into which group, what the amount threshold is, you decide these; what I've written are only examples. What matters is that the boundary is drawn in advance, not in the moment of the decision. Then, in the middle of the excitement, you don't have to think "is this a shared decision?"; the answer is already written down.

The spending side is a separate topic, and I covered it in detail in the article impulsive spending and money fights. Here I'm looking at the bigger picture: decisions that change the direction of your life.

The 24-hour rule: putting a night between deciding and acting

The impulse comes in an instant and often fades overnight. The waiting rule in the glossary was meant for shopping, but it works with the same logic for big decisions: putting time between deciding and acting.

The rule is simple. When a decision that falls into the shared group comes to mind, you don't act on it for 24 hours. Thinking, researching, daydreaming are all allowed. Not filling in and sending the application form, not calling the owner of the listing and paying a deposit, leaving the ticket in the basket. For decisions that are hard to reverse, this period goes up to a week.

During this wait, I suggest writing the decision in a note in three lines:

1. What do I want?
2. Why now?
3. Who does this decision affect, and how?

The second question is the most revealing. If your answer to "why now" is "because I'm so bored" or "because I had a really bad day yesterday," the decision may be right, but its timing comes from emotion. If you still want it the next day, it's no longer an impulse, it's a decision. And it's ready to take to your partner.

I don't know of any research that directly tests this rule in adults with ADHD; in that respect the evidence is limited. But its logic matches the two findings above: if inhibition is short, lengthen the pause from the outside; if "now" weighs more, postpone "now."

A shared decision threshold: a written agreement

Putting the rule on paper helps a great deal for it to hold. Every rule that relies on remembering gets skipped one day in ADHD. Something written down, on the other hand, also answers the question "what did we agree on?" in the middle of an argument.

A sample agreement text:

Jobs, the home, shared holidays and spending over 5,000 lira are our joint decisions. When a decision like this comes to mind, we wait 24 hours and, before acting, tell each other about it as "I'm thinking about it." For quitting, a lease and large debts, this period is one week. Decisions below this limit belong to each of us and aren't questioned. If a decision falls outside the rule, we don't hide it; we say so the same day. Once a month we read this text together.

Pay attention to the last two sentences. The rule will sometimes be broken. What matters is what happens when it is. When a hidden decision comes out, the fight is no longer about the decision but about the hiding. An exception told the same day, on the other hand, wears down trust much less.

This threshold has one more benefit: it also keeps your partner from interfering in every decision you make. Everything below the threshold is entirely yours. This clarity reduces the sense of being controlled for both sides. A similar routine helps with making promises too; I described it in the article making promises without thinking.

Without killing the excitement

Rules like these carry a risk: trapping the person with ADHD in an approval mechanism that takes the joy out of life. I don't want that. Spontaneity is one of the most beautiful things many people with ADHD bring to a relationship. Saying "let's go to the sea" on a Sunday morning adds color to the relationship, as long as it stays below the threshold.

That's why, if I were you, I would deliberately make room for spontaneity. Let's say one weekend a month is an "unplanned day." That day you can do whatever you want below the threshold, and your partner has said "yes" to it in advance. The excitement doesn't disappear; it just moves into a safe space.

Then there's the way you bring the decision to your partner. The difference between "I did this" and "I'm thinking about this" is huge. The first is a done deal, the second is an invitation. When you carry the same excitement in the second sentence, your partner becomes not the one hitting the brakes, but the one sharing the dream. I had also touched on the tension around planning in the article making plans and last-minute habits; there too, the solution wasn't to ban the lack of plans, but to draw a boundary around it.

How to tell your partner

Don't open this conversation in the middle of a new decision. Choose a calm day. Think in three parts: what happened, what goes on in your head, what you're suggesting.

Example sentences:

• "Lately I've made a few decisions that affect you without asking you. I can see that this left you on the outside."
• "I don't do it because I don't care about you. In that moment, an opportunity looks huge in my head and what comes after looks tiny. This isn't an excuse, I'm trying to explain where I slip."
• "I don't want to say 'it won't happen again,' because I know I can't keep that with a promise. Instead I'm suggesting a rule: for big decisions I'll wait 24 hours and come to you first saying 'I'm thinking about it.'"
• "Let's decide together which decisions will be shared. For the rest, I'd like you to trust me."

Your partner will have things to say too, and they'll probably carry some built-up hurt. Listening without trying to correct it or offer an explanation for every example is half of this conversation. If you're thinking about how to explain ADHD in general, the article telling your partner about your ADHD may help.

When to get help

If sudden decisions have turned into serious debts, job losses or a constant crisis in the relationship, talking about it with a couples therapist can change a lot; I described what's possible in the article does couples therapy work for ADHD. You can also talk with your doctor about the treatment side of impulsivity.

What stays with me

To my mind, the hardest part of this question is that the person who makes sudden decisions often feels in the right. Because the decision can really be good. The new job is better, the new home is nicer, the holiday is wonderful. But in a relationship, making the right decision isn't enough; the right decision has to be made together. Your partner's hurt isn't about the outcome of the decision, but about not having been part of it.

ADHD is an explanation here, but not an exemption. Your partner's life is shaped by your decisions too. That's why, instead of saying "this is how I am," I'm in favor of building predictability through routine. The 24-hour rule and the shared decision threshold are things you talk about and write down once. After that, you don't have to fight yourself on every excited evening; you just wait one night.

I also think this: being able to decide quickly is a talent. What's needed is not to put it out, but to add a partner to it. When your partner enters the decision process, your excitement doesn't shrink; you just aren't carrying it alone anymore.