Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship #187 - How ADHD Affects Adult Friendships: For People With ADHD and Their Friends (Cate Osborn and Erik Gude)
The Friendship Side of ADHD We Don’t Talk About Enough
ADHD is getting more attention right now, but one part of the conversation often gets overlooked: how ADHD affects adult friendships for the person with ADHD and for that person's friends.
To learn more, I spoke with Cate Osborn and Erik Gude, the duo behind the podcast Catie and Erik’s Infinite Quest: An ADHD Adventure and co-authors of the new book, The ADHD Field Guide for Adults.
We discussed the friendship side of ADHD—especially the gap between caring deeply about people and actually managing the follow-through that friendship requires. We also talked about why making friends can feel easy (for some people with ADHD) while keeping them can feel much harder; how executive dysfunction affects things like reaching out, planning ahead, remembering important details, and staying present in conversation; and why “if they wanted to, they would” is often too simplistic when ADHD is involved.
This conversation is for both people with ADHD navigating friendship and the friends who want to better understand them. Cate and Erik make a strong case for both sides: more compassion from neurotypical friends, and more responsibility from people with ADHD to build systems that help them show up well in relationships.
It’s an honest, practical conversation about communication, rejection sensitivity, misunderstanding, and what it takes to create friendships that are both more realistic and more resilient.
HIGHLIGHTS:
- How executive dysfunction affects texting back, planning, remembering, and following through
- Why reaching out is such a loaded issue in adult friendships
- The difference between intention and behavior in ADHD
- How ADHD can affect conversation styles, including interrupting and anecdotal communication
- What rejection sensitivity is and how it shapes friendships
- Why shame can make it even harder to reconnect after time passes
- The kinds of systems and structures that can help people with ADHD be better friends (and why those systems will be different for every person with ADHD)
- Why it matters to ask for what you need instead of testing your friendships
- How to tell the difference between a friendship problem and a simple difference in communication style
MEET CATE OSBORN & ERIK GUDE
CATE OSBORN, along with Erik Gude, is an educator and advocate for people with ADHD. She is the host of Sorry I Missed This on Understood.org, which focuses on ADHD’s impact on relationships, communication, and intimacy, and the cohost of Catie and Erik’s Infinite Quest: An ADHD Adventure. A certified sex educator, she is the advisor to Playboy for her expertise in the intersection of intimacy and neurodiversity. Her work has also appeared in Cosmopolitan, The New York Times, GQ, HuffPost, and other outlets. Find out more at Catieosaurus.com. Follow Cate on TikTok and Instagram @catieosaurus.
ERIK GUDE, along with Cate Osborn, is an educator and advocate for people with ADHD. He cohosts Catie and Erik’s Infinite Quest: An ADHD Adventure and, with Cate Osborn, and frequently hosts panels about the intersection of ADHD and gaming at conventions, including DragonCon, Emerald City Comic Con, GenCon, MomoCon, and San Diego Comic-Con. Erik’s ADHD Crafting Challenge was a huge success on TikTok with over 20 million views. A former cook, he is now a prop maker and fabricator at the legendary Fonco Studios. Follow him on TikTok and Instagram @HeyGude.
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Special thank you, as always, to my assistant producer, Rebekah Jacobs!