In this episode of the Translating ADHD podcast, Asher and Dusty explore the concept of New Relationship Energy (NRE) and how it uniquely impacts individuals with ADHD. They discuss how ADHD brains are drawn to novelty and intense dopamine experiences, which can make the early stages of any relationship—romantic or friendship—feel overwhelming and all-consuming. The hosts highlight challenges such as impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, and the difficulty in distinguishing genuine connection from the excitement of novelty. They stress the importance of time to truly know someone, managing expectations upfront, and being cautious to avoid rushing into commitments or overlooking red flags.
Asher and Dusty also share practical tips for maintaining healthy relationships beyond the initial novelty phase. These include setting clear communication expectations, using reminders to retain important details about partners or friends, and regularly renegotiating relationship needs to ensure mutual well-being. They emphasize self-awareness about personal values, limitations, and compatibility, along with the necessity of protecting oneself from toxic relationships by moving at a comfortable pace. Overall, the episode offers both insight and actionable strategies for people with ADHD to navigate new relationships thoughtfully and sustainably.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:02:11] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash.
[00:03:18] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[00:04:20] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD. Listeners, a reminder that the next live coaching demo is with me on Thursday, May 14th at 8 p.m. EST. I will coach one participant and then we’ll talk about what we heard in the coaching afterwards. So if you’re curious about coaching, if you’ve never had experience with coaching before, and you want a little more insight into what a coaching session looks like, this is a great opportunity for you to experience that.
This is for our Patreon subscribers only. So if you visit the website https://www.translatingadhd.com/ and click on the Patreon tab, for $5/month, you gain access to these monthly events with either Dusty or myself, and you gain access to the podcast Discord. I am also still taking new clients, really trying to pack my schedule. We’re doing a lot more sliding scale because the economy is what it is right now.
So if you are interested in coaching with me, visit my website https://coachasher.com/ and fill out the form. We’ll get a time set up to talk and if you do need to discuss sliding scale, that is okay. I understand that it’s a tough economy right now and we are all in this together.
[01:14:03] Dusty: Also, the early bird discount on the ADHD boot camp is ending on May 11th. The ADHD Boot Camp is my annual mega body doubling decluttering session, so I’m going to support you guys in organizing your house and making it more ADHD friendly. There’s a big gang of us every year, and it’s always both exhausting and fun and really wonderful.
If you go to https://www.adhdstudio.ca/ and use the code “Boot Camp 2026”, you get a discount of $100, only until May 11th.
[01:44:15] Asher: So Dusty.
[01:45:21] Dusty: So, Ash.
[01:46:15] Asher: You want to tell our listeners what we’re talking about today?
[01:49:09] Dusty: We’re talking about ADHD and NRE or new relationship energy.
[01:54:21] Asher: Ooh, I’m excited about this topic. Where do you want to start?
[01:58:17] Dusty: So it has been said that the new relationship phase for people with ADHD is something that we kind of want to think about in the context of our ADHD, because we know that ADHD brains love novelty and we get a ton of dopamine from our novelty.
There is pretty much nothing in this world as an adult that is more dopamine fueling than a new person who’s giving you attention, who’s making you feel amazing, a person that you’re super interested in. And it can be pretty intense.
So we all experience the new relationship energy phase. And there’s an interesting science about the cascade of neurotransmitters and hormones that’s happening during this phase and how long it lasts because there’s a distinctive drop off. We know scientifically that these chemicals last for only so many weeks.
But I think the problem is, when we’re bringing in all these ADHD aspects of ourselves like impulsivity, dopamine seeking, novelty seeking, coming to a relationship with a history of poor self-esteem or struggling with self-worth and there’s this person that is making you feel amazing and seeing you, giving you lots of validation about how great you are, it can be really challenging.
And then we’ve got emotional dysregulation in there too, right? So I’ve heard from a lot of people that the new relationship energy phase with ADHD can feel much more intense than it would for most people, almost all consuming.
So you’re already struggling to get basic tasks done, it’s already hard enough to get through the day and take care of business and now you’re adding in on top, this complete physiological, head to toe, full body distraction where you’re just obsessing about this person.
I think the new phase can be really disruptive to managing your tasks. It becomes a huge distraction. But also, I think it’s something that can be challenging because of impulsivity. There’s a risk of love bombing. There’s a risk in both directions. There’s a risk of going too fast, too deep, skipping red flags and just seeing the best in this person. And impulsively, like, making commitments, moving into serious commitments too quickly.
And then lastly, one of the things that tends to happen is sometimes we can’t distinguish between, this is a new person and this is the novelty. So for some relationships where one or both people have ADHD, there can be this big drop off.
I’ve seen partners of people with ADHD sort of report this experience of they’re getting all this attention from their ADHD partner, they feel amazing. They feel on top of the world. And then all of a sudden one day it wears off and the person with ADHD, “forgets” that they exist and goes back to what they were doing.
And that’s probably going to happen either way with ADHD. But if you’re not sure if you actually like the person themselves or you just like the way that they’re making you feel, or you just like the feeling of the new relationship energy and the novelty, then I think you also run the potential of really hurting people. And I don’t know about you, Ash, but for me, in my teens, in my early 20s, this was a huge factor.
Any time that there was a new person, I was just so obsessed with them. And then when the “new” would wear off, sometimes I would find oh, actually, this person’s not even that interesting to me. I don’t even find them attractive. It was like a dream that wore off. And so I’m sure I probably, you know, left a trail of broken hearts behind me.
I think it’s really important, as a person with ADHD, to know that about yourself and to be a little cautious because we don’t want to be hurting people.
[05:35:00] Asher: Dusty, while this is not the topic of today’s episode, I do think it’s important to also call out that in that new phase, when novelty is kind of in charge, we are also vulnerable to toxic people. And we did an episode on this Season 3, Episode 20 – The ADHD Experience: Vulnerabilities in Relationships. If you plug that into Google with Translating ADHD, it’ll take you right to that episode, which we’ve already discussed.
So I’m not going to say more about that today other than to just double down on the fact that this does uniquely make ADHD people vulnerable to falling into toxic relationships. For those reasons that you were stating that the other person makes us feel really good in a certain way, but bringing it back to non toxic relationships, I do want to call out that we’re not just talking about romantic relationships here.
This can be a new friendship in which this type of experience happens, where the novelty of the friendship has you go deep quickly and then you do the ADHD thing where you fall off. So Dusty, you talked about three different aspects of this: #1 Managing yourself and #2 Having the “new” take over and make it hard to attend to other portions of life.
Did you talk about three things? What was the third?
[07:03:24] Dusty: I would say managing yourself, managing safety and then managing other people’s feelings or managing impact on others. So that middle part managing safety is the one you’re missing. It’s because of impulsivity and emotional dysregulation and how overwhelming it is. The issue too is we can skip red flags and we can make commitments too quickly, right?
Where all of a sudden you’ve moved across the country to be with some person and it turns out they’re super problematic, or you move them into your house or they’re having a hard time, they just lost their job and you lend them a bunch of money, something like that. Right?
[07:43:16] Asher: Precisely Dusty. And again, that episode that I just named, we talk more about that second one. So if that is of interest to you, look up and listen to that episode. I don’t think we’re going to spend any more time on that one today. And that first one I think we address in many different ways on this show because we talk about cause and effect.
So that is the cause. That is a distraction. But we talk all the time about how to manage distractions, how to deal with your ADHD in that way. So I think the interesting place to go today is that third one – how do you show up? How do you manage your own ADHD as you are navigating new relationships, be they romantic relationships or social relationships?
[08:31:11] Dusty: I mean, I think that the first and most important thing is just to know that this is a thing, just to have awareness that people with ADHD can have a tendency to become attached to the novelty of a person, and it can be hard to distinguish whether or not you actually like this person, or you just like the feeling of this new with them.
[08:51:09] Asher: Okay, Dusty, so with that awareness that this is a thing, how do you for yourself distinguish between those two things?
[09:02:00] Dusty: Oh man, everyone’s going to hate the answer. But the answer actually is also going to address the second piece around safety. And it’s just – there is no substitute for time. I really learned this the hard way, getting into a very toxic and not good relationship years ago. And I did exactly that.
I got way too deep, way too fast. I made a big commitment, and by the time the red flag started showing up, it was already too late. There was so much invested and it became a sunk cost fallacy. It cost me years of my life.
The thing is, when we are in that now, we’re just flooded with serotonin and dopamine and we’re seeing the best in people and we think we “know” them.
And so, there’s this impulse, I think, to be like, okay, I know who this person is. I see them, I like them. But you can’t know someone just from them telling you about themselves. You can’t know them all at once. The only way to truly know someone is to go through experiences with them and see them in different phases of their life.
How do they handle stress? How do they handle being disappointed? It’s really easy to see the best in someone when you’re giving them everything they want and they’re giving you everything that you want and they’re happy, right? What happens the first time you let them down? What happens when they’re going through life? What happens when you ask for more or you disappoint them or they disappoint you? Or what happens when they’re struggling?
The only way to know who a person truly is is to experience them over time in different situations. And you just can’t cram that into a week, a month, whatever. Because people are always putting their best foot forward at the beginning. And so I think the only way to know if you really like someone for who they are and whether the relationship feels good versus you just like the way that they make you feel is time, right? There’s no substitute for time.
[11:03:17] Asher: I 100% agree with that, Dusty. And on top of that, I will add that something that I do in any new relationship is I manage that expectation upfront, that I am a slow burn, that I want to take things slowly, that I don’t want to make any serious commitments for an amount of time, that I want to take our time getting to know each other, dating each other, spending time together before we make any commitments from there.
And that not only kind of sets the tone for the other person, especially if that person also has ADHD but it lets them know where I’m at. It also is a good first step in terms of opening the lines of communication, because if at some point I am somewhere different, then that’s an opportunity. If I do want to take the next step, then that’s something that I need to communicate with that person.
Or if they are feeling like they want something more out of the relationship, I make sure that they know that that door is open, that I may not be able to give them what they’re asking for, but that they can always talk to me about where they are and how they’re feeling, because I don’t want to inadvertently hurt someone else’s feelings.
I try to be really clear about where I’m at, but also leave the door open for exploring after a period of time. Do we take the next step, and if so, what does that next step look like?
[12:32:07] Dusty: You know, the question is, how can you tell if you really like someone or if you just like the new relationship energy or how they make you feel?
And part of that has to do with knowing yourself and understanding your needs, understanding your preferences and understanding your ethics and your values. Right? If you meet somebody and they generally share your ethics and values and they have a lifestyle that’s compatible with your lifestyle and you have some level of shared interests or whatever that’s good.
If you can identify things about them that you know, historically you’ve liked or that have worked for you, you have to give it time, but I think there’s a higher likelihood things may work. And I think it’s really important to recognize, if you’ve met someone who’s just so different from everyone else you’ve ever met, do you actually share values?
Because if the answer’s no, then as soon as the new energy wears off, you’re gonna have some hard, hard arguments, right? Is there some compatibility of lifestyle? And you can’t know these things unless you’re honest with yourself about your needs and your limitations.
I’ve been sort of slowly dating somebody who is going through autistic burnout. And one of the things that we had to navigate first is, is this going to be okay for both of us? Because I, as you know, have a very busy, very chaotic lifestyle, which can be pretty challenging on a sensory level to a person who is in burnout and autistic. As a person who tends to give a lot of care, is it a safe choice for me to enter into something serious with someone who’s going to need a lot of care, like, is that fair to me? Is that sustainable? Do I have the capacity? And, is that just going to be healthy for me?
And so we both actually weren’t sure so we’ve been taking it really slow so that we can make sure that it’s going to be safe for both of us. We really, really like each other but that doesn’t really matter because at the end of the day that like is going to go away. And if several years from now or several months from now, we’re really stressing each other out and causing unhealthiness for each other because we’re not compatible – that won’t work.
So we just have to wait and take time to see what it’s like to go through days and weeks and months and what that looks like for us. There’s no shortcut. And so I think it’s okay not to know, but at least in this instance, I can be honest about my limitations.
I’m a very busy person. I have a lot of people to care for already. Can I cope with having a partner who’s maybe not always able to show up for me because they might be having a really tough day themselves? We’re going to find out, right? I think it’s going really well so far. But it’s about being honest with yourself about your preferences and that kind of thing.
With ADHD, you know, we got to stay out of shame. But we do have certain limitations. For example, I’m really messy and it’s tough because I actually think I’m a pretty clean person. I clean up after myself a lot, but it’s something that I’ve had to learn to do, right? It doesn’t come naturally to me.
And so I give myself a lot of credit for all the progress that I’ve made. I’m very comfortable with the level that I can maintain my home in my space. But I also acknowledge that there are other people who find it not to their level of preference, or it might be stressful for them. Same with how I manage my calendar, right?
I like to be busy. I like to do a lot of things. Things get a little chaotic sometimes. Some people can’t roll with that, it’s too stressful for them. And so I have to be aware of what are limitations for me or things about me that might cause friction points for people who are very different from me. And how is that going to gel? And not just now – what’s that going to be like in five years.
[16:32:01] Asher: Really well said Dusty. I do briefly want to go back to the shared values/shared interests piece, because there is a potential red flag in there too. A common abuse tactic is known as mirroring.
So if somebody seems too perfect for you, you might want to step back and evaluate. Are they showing you themselves or are they just reflecting back? Are they just taking in who you are and reflecting that back to you?
[17:03:09] Dusty: Yeah, and there’s something really interesting here to be said about naïveté. And although this isn’t necessarily a DSM characteristic, I’ve certainly found it to be the case that sometimes with ADHD, we do struggle with a kind of naïveté, because as neurodivergent people, a lot of us tend to be very authentic.
We wear our hearts on our sleeves. We always try to do our best and speak truthfully. But the problem is, I think we assume the same of others. We have this problem where we’re because we’re open hearted and we wear hearts on our sleeves, we think that that’s the case with everyone else, and we forget to remember that not everyone is a safe person, right?
Some people are unsafe, some people are looking to harm, some people are looking to manipulate, or some people may not even be doing it intentionally, but they just might be messy people who have problems. And so I think we’re too quick, too often to trust others. And that’s the problem with oversharing, too, right?
There is the tendency with ADHD to overshare. But if you are oversharing with someone that you think is a safe person, that you think is a lot like you, you’re potentially handing harmful information that can later be then used to manipulate or control you.
So again, that’s why it’s so important to go slow and not show your whole hand at once because you just don’t know if someone’s a safe person until you’ve seen what they do with some pieces of information.
If you’re like displaying your whole personality, there is the potential that a person could just map onto that. I don’t think that necessarily people have to have all the same interests. I think it’s actually quite good when they have separate interests. But is there enough overlap of interest that you’ll have something to talk about years down the road?
[18:41:22] Asher: Yeah. Again, I think, too many shared interests can kind of feed into that red flag. And more so than that, I’ve come to think of trust as something that is earned over time. I no longer give implicit trust. It’s not that I’m mistrustful in a new friendship or relationship, but I am better at distinguishing.
What level of trust do I know this person to be on? Have we been through stuff together and how have they shown up for me or have we not? Do I not yet know whether or not I can place my full trust in this person? And again, you can only know that with time. So now, Dusty, let’s pivot to the novelty piece wearing off.
So novelty is an incredible motivator for people with ADHD so early in a relationship. It can be very, very easy. Almost too easy, almost all encompassing, for us to attend to another person. But when that novelty wears off, even if we still care about somebody, we can do that ADHD thing of sort of unintentionally ghosting somebody, or all of a sudden there’s just this total tone change that this other person is experiencing where communication drops off.
I have a couple of thoughts about that. The first is I try to manage how much I communicate with somebody when the relationship is new. I try not to overly lean into oh, I want to talk to this person all the time. I want to be texting and talking with them 24/7. So that way I’m not setting up a pace upfront that is going to be unsustainable over time.
And again, this plays right back into taking it slow. There’s more than one reason to kind of pump the brakes for yourself in that novelty phase. But secondly, when novelty wears off, if this is something real, if this is something you want to keep pursuing, you might need some actual strategies in order to keep that going. I have sort of multiple core relationships in my life, friendships and intimate relationships, and it’s a fair bit to juggle as a person with ADHD.
I actually keep notes and set myself reminders – these people are important enough to me that I keep notes about where we are, what we’ve talked about last, and even things like what I think my expectation is in terms of how often I should be communicating with this person. Then I make it part of my daily and weekly practice to make sure that I’m keeping those lines of communication open.
I leave myself reminders. Is it sexy? No. But is it needed for me as a person with ADHD, especially since a lot of my relationships are with other neurodivergent people to not just let the lines of communication fall away, yes it is.
Also, I find it really helpful to discuss expectations about how often we spend time together with another person, especially since I am in more than one relationship, so that way we are on the same page. I know what the expectation is. I know what fits into their life. We’ve come to an understanding about what works for you, what works for me and so now it’s just a matter of taking care of the logistics. But I can take care of the logistics much easier knowing what the expectation is versus it being this open question mark.
[22:17:28] Dusty: Yeah. I think expectation management is important. And you said something there, “oh it’s not very sexy leaving yourself reminders”, but this is the thing and I’m willing to bet this will resonate with a lot of people too. When I have a new relationship, whether it’s a friendship or a romantic relationship – I don’t need any reminders. You tell me something, I will remember it. I will get you. You tell me you have some interest or you owned something 20 years ago that you never found again – I will find that crap on Etsy for you and give the best Christmas present ever – at first.
You know what I mean? I’m really good at that at the beginning, remembering. I’m very interested in the person, but then it does fade because life comes back, right? You can only keep life out while you’re in your little love bubble for so long, and then life comes back in and it can get harder to pay attention to your partner all the time.
There’s nothing that feels worse than having your partner tell you something about themselves and you don’t remember it, or even ask you to do something differently and you keep not remembering it.
A really good example is one of my very best friends does not have pierced ears, and I’ve known her for years, but it was like a birthday, Christmas, birthday and I sent her earrings three times in a row. Then I’d be like, how do you like the present I sent you? And she’d be like, they are great, if I had pierced ears. And it wasn’t until that moment when I realized, oh my gosh, that’s right, I sent you a gift like this last time!
I don’t know why the information that her ears are not pierced is just not getting in there and I keep forgetting. So, I keep getting her earrings because I keep finding cute earrings and the thing is, I’m trying to do something really nice because I’ll find earrings that are related to things that she likes, like fruit that she likes or colors that she likes, or things that I think will really work for her.
But – I’m missing this key piece of data, and I feel like such a jerk. And this has happened to me in relationships before, where people have told me they have a strong dislike of something or I do something that kind of bothers them and I genuinely want to do better, and the information just doesn’t get retained.
And it might happen time after time after time. So yeah, notes aren’t sexy, but I certainly find the way that I show up for my partner or even my friends, is to keep notes, literally. Now, when I have a new person, I just keep a list of things that they tell me that I want to remember, like facts about them or preferences, because I know I’m not going to remember forever, and I don’t want to feel like a bad partner later when I can’t name their favorite food or I don’t remember some anniversary that’s really important to them.
It doesn’t happen because now I know better to just start capturing it and not to think that just because I’m doing a really good job remembering all these things now, because I’m interested in them, that that’s going to happen later. Notes are essential.
I once read this really good tip for people who’ve been in a long term partnership. I can’t remember the context, but it was basically when your partner gets home from work, set a timer for five minutes, or look at a clock discretely and shut up for five minutes. Ask them about their day and just listen to them. Make a goal of listening for five minutes without interrupting because it will make them feel really heard and cared about.
And sometimes we need to remember how to listen because we forget. Especially if you’re living with someone, co-parenting with them. I think it’s just too easy to fall into a pattern where you just start to see them as this person in your house and you forget to stop and actually, listen to them the way that you used to listen.
Setting that five minute goal, enables you to show up as the person you want to be, because once your partner starts talking, you’re actually able to hear them. And then they feel really cared about and the outcome justifies the means.
So as the relationship goes on and becomes less novel and becomes more routine, we need to rely more and more on some of these external structures to help us show up as good partners. And that might be a weird concept for some people.
I’ve heard of people putting sex on their calendar, like saying don’t forget to have sex this week. Because for some people, you know, with ADHD, they might be very hypersexual, they might be very caught up in whatever their current interest is or whatever’s going on in their heads and literally not check in with their bodies and forget to make a bit of space and time for arousal. So they got to put it on their calendar.
You do what you have to do, to show up as a good partner. And that’s okay.
[26:48:14] Asher: Really well said Dusty. And the last thing that I will add, because this has been such a helpful framework for me, is something we talked about in a previous episode, we talked about flexible relationship frameworks.
We were talking about things like kink and polyamory and nontraditional relationships. And in those types of relationships, negotiation is a necessity because there are so many moving parts that you’re always negotiating and renegotiating, which is so helpful for ADHD, because it means that you’re always coming back to and asking yourself those curious questions about, is this relationship working for me?
If not, what do I need to ask for? What do I need to change? What do I want out of this? And I think in a long term monogamous relationship, you can lose sight of that. You just forget to come back and check in with yourself about what’s working and what’s not working, to check in with your partner about what’s working or what’s not working. You just sort of get right where you go with the flow of life and you don’t realize that you’re not attending.
So even if you are monogamous and not kinky, the concept of negotiating and renegotiating and having that always be an open door if something doesn’t feel right for me, if I want to renegotiate time spent, or how we spend time, or how you’re showing up in a situation or how I’m showing up in this situation, I just think it’s a really helpful concept because again, it’s that reminder to ourselves, the person with ADHD, to check in with ourselves, to get curious about the relationship, to not just let it slide onto the backburner without realizing how to do it. And, it opens those lines of communication between you and your partner to have these explicit conversations to keep putting that effort into making the relationship something that is good and positive for both of you.
[28:46:05] Dusty: Well said.
[28:47:05] Asher: And on that note, Dusty, I think this is a good place for us to wrap today’s episode. So listeners, until next week, I’m Ash.
[28:54:00] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[28:55:01] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
