Do You Hear What I Hear?

Our medical insurance company sends us newsletters, as most do. Sometimes they're informative; sometimes they're forgettable.

Years ago, one newsletter had an article asking, "Are you an adult with undiagnosed ADD?" I read the article and then the quiz that accompanied it. Then I brought it to my husband. "Take a look at these questions," I said. The quiz was supposed to be similar to ones used by doctors to diagnose ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder.

He read through, then chuckled. "That's ridiculous," he said. "That's not going to tell anybody anything."

"How do you figure?" I asked.

"Everyone will answer 'yes' to those questions."

Wow. Unexpected.

"I would answer 'no' to every single one of those questions."

His eyes widened, and he stared at me as if I'd just stepped out of a spaceship. Then he uttered the sentence that would have made me a multimillionaire if I had the proverbial nickel for every time I'd heard it: "Yeah? Well, that's just you."

Answering 6 out of 9 questions on the doctor's questionnaire is a positive ADD diagnosis. When my husband did go in to the doctor for a screening, he answered "yes" to 9 out of 9.

We've both learned a lot about ADD since then, but it's also obvious that our brain chemistry is very different. We occasionally have... interesting conversations.

I dislike driving in large cities, and I usually make my husband do it. Occasionally I'll end up doing it, like the time we flew into Las Vegas in order to visit our daughter at her summer job at Zion National Park. I'm familiar enough with Vegas that I didn't think it would be a big deal, but I did remind the kids to be quiet and non-distracting, at least until we got out of town.

As I was driving the unfamiliar rental car onto the freeway and out into traffic, it wasn't the kids who were distracting me. My husband had to push every button, open every compartment, adjust everything that could be adjusted. After saying, repeatedly, "Please leave that alone," and "That's really distracting - could you leave it be?" I bit his head off about half an hour later as we headed out of town and into the desert. "STOP THAT! I've asked you over and over to leave things ALONE! It's INCREDIBLY distracting! Just leave everything alone!"

He appeared startled, and baffled as to why I would be upset. Then he said, "What do you want me to do, just sit here?"

"YES! YES! That's EXACTLY what I want you to do! It's called 'being a passenger!' What, are you five years old?"

I cannot fathom why this would even be a question. He cannot fathom a world in which a person would willingly leave buttons and knobs, especially in a new and unfamiliar setting, alone.

Reading a similar quiz on sensory processing years ago, I thought that some of the choices on the multiple choice quiz were joke responses. You know how occasionally the writer will throw in an obviously wrong answer? The question might be, "Who was the first president of the United States?" and, for whatever reason, one of the responses will be, "Bugs Bunny." I was positive that one out of every four options was one of those "giveaway" responses that no one would choose.

It turns out that I was wrong. Not only did people choose those responses, but the person I was married to, lived with and combined genes with in order to reproduce was one of those people.

It turns out that I am on the high sensitivity end of the spectrum, and my husband is on the low sensitivity end. While I cringe and cover my ears when I hear sirens, my husband finds this odd. I avoid large crowds and loud noises; my husband finds those things to be exciting. It's a very interesting balancing act when one partner thinks that loud is obnoxious, and one partner thinks that quiet is boring.

High sensitivity people tend to need a large amount of personal space. (Ask my kids how often I say, "Respect the bubble!") Low sensitivity people tend not to know their own strength and therefore frequently break things. (Ask my husband why we cannot buy yard implements like shovels with wooden handles. We have to get fiberglass or steel.)

Naturally, we have kids like me and kids like him. I took my youngest daughter on a school field trip to an art museum a couple of years ago. One of the exhibits consisted of strobe lights going off in a darkened room. Two flashes, and I was crawling out of my skin. Thirty seconds in, I was feeling borderline violent. Even closing my eyes didn't help. The flashes went through my eyelids like they were paper. I could not wait to get out of the room; it was like being pummeled. If a sinister group ever wanted to brainwash me into violence, this would be a good first step. My daughter, on the other hand, kept saying things like, "This is so soothing," and, "This is going to put me to sleep." I finally had to drag her away.

Annoying sounds - alarms, high pitched anything, repetetive noises - make me crazier the longer they go on. The longer they go on, the more my husband tunes them out. Just about the time he has entirely eliminated them from his consciousness, they have driven me insane. I will snap, "Can you shut that thing up?" and nine times out of ten, it'll take him a moment to figure out what "thing" I'm even talking about.

Yeah, it's very interesting balancing these personalities in the same family.

I can at least partially imagine what it must be like to be my husband. He has very little frame of reference for what it's like to be me. Years ago, trying to describe to him what it feels like to be in total overload caused him to respond, "So, you're having too much fun. How terrible that must be." Saying, "It's like being struck" to describe how loud or piercing noises affected me had him responding, "So it's mild and easily ignored." NO! Not the point I was trying to make! I would never have described having someone hit me as easy to  ignore!

It was very difficult for him to understand why I do not like thrill rides. He couldn't say, "You'd like it if you just tried it" because I have tried it. That's how I know that I hate it. It is nothing even approaching fun. It is terrifying and nauseating. Study after study shows that the brain waves of people like me have the same reaction to little kiddie rides as the brains of people like my husband have on extreme rides. He knows this is true, but can't imagine it. For my part, I tease him because in those photos taken on rides, he frequently had the same look on his face as he would have had sitting at home on our couch watching TV. Everyone else would be screaming, and he'd be almost blank. (In recent years, he's decided to pose for the cameras, so we know that he's having fun.)

Driving is also interesting. High sensitivity brains tend to see huge "DANGER! DANGER!" flags in situations where ordinary people see nothing amiss. By the time my husband wonders if something is dangerous, I'm in a full blown panic. I hate speed. I hate having vehicles too close to me - this translates not only as too close in front or behind me, but next to me at all. I wish that drivers who weave would spontaneously combust. Once, when parking, I kept insisting I was out of space and needed to stop, and my husband kept urging me to pull up farther. I kept saying, "I'm out of room!" and he kept saying, "You have plenty of room!" Finally, he snapped, "You have a full three inches to spare!" There's our problem. I cannot consider anything under three feet to be "plenty."

At least he's not an adrenaline junkie. I simply do not understand those people. All that, "You're not alive unless you're on the edge!" business causes me to roll my eyes. It's OK - they don't understand me, either. My sit-in-the-quiet-with-a-book sensibilities don't do it for them.

I cannot understand those scenes in movies where the girl squeals at the guy not to drive so fast, or not to do a loop in the plane, but he does and she ends up finding it adorable. If some guy ignored my terror and did something I'd asked him not to, I would not later melt over his sexiness. I'd decide that he was dense and self involved and I'd never want to go out with him again. He, on the other hand, would decide that I was alien and a stick in the mud, and he probably wouldn't miss me.

With luck, though, I'll never have to worry about dating situations again. Neither will my husband. After almost three decades, I think he and I have this marriage thing almost figured out.