Chalk and Cheese

I am desperately seeking help. Around 20 years ago I thought I met the girl of my dreams. She was beautiful, extremely kind and I enjoyed being with her. Even at this early stage I noticed that she was always on the move doing one thing or another, she spent money like there was no tomorrow and often her facts were a bit confused. I loved her dynamism as I am very slow to be motivated. I am very intelligent and analyse everything thoroughly and found her weird facts and confusion and slow brain a bit annoying. However, being lavished with gifts, presents and love overcame these issues. We had a fairly rocky courtship. I know at times I can be dismissive and self absorbed but I always felt that whenever my girlfriend was stressed I was to blame. This took the form of irrational blow ups, the silent treatment and I could never really understand where she was coming from. We would make up, things would be great and then the pattern would repeat. Sometimes I would react very badly to these irrational outbursts as in my view they were really hurtful and provocative. Whenever I would react, her parents or sisters were informed and because normally she is so sweet and kind to everyone else I was labelled as the monster. We overlooked most of the problems  and still got married.

Things were generally Ok until the large mortgage and second child came around. I found her spending and lack of planning obscene and she found the fact that I left her to deal with the routine chores and kids all the time overwhelming. Both of us are working and my wife owns her own business. As I said I can be very slow to move but my wife has left 2 business partners because they left everything to her and I blame this partially on her inability to stop. However, I love it when she is away and I can look after the children in an orderly way without the ensuing chaos. I do not find it overwhelming and often question her about this. She says I criticise her constantly when she is doing everything for the family but in my view it is quantity and not quality she is looking at. Whilst I am planning she is doing.

We made some major renovations to the house. I planned all the work efficiently whilst again she just wanted to spend money we didn't have all the time. She got incredibly frustrated at the dust as she wanted to move out - not caring about the money required for rent. She got frustrated at the amount of time it was taking and I was to blame. From then on I spend my days walking on egg shells. Blow up after blow up. 

She tells me of her learning difficulties at school, the fact that she is constantly overwhelmed, and she does not follow conversations very well. I researched and suggested she may have ADHD. She looked at the symptoms and said that I also displayed some of them.

I researched a bit more and found that even though I excelled in school, thrived on efficiency, that my inability to get up in the morning and procrastination was probably due to ADHD. I was relieved to discover what was causing my somewhat quirky behaviour.

The problem is now that she blames all our marital problems on this.  However, I am sure that her total lack of efficiency, long term understanding of money, weird inconsistencies and inability to think through a logical thread is sympomatic of her ADHD.

I have bought the ADHD effect in Marriage book which I hoped she would read and understand but yet again she is unable to reconcile the theory with actual practice. She thinks because she does not procrastinate with doing chores or buying things she can not have ADHD and trying to reason with her is next to impossible. She says that love should overcome everything and that she overlooked my "laziness" initially but has now had enough because she is unhappy that I did not let her have her way with the house renovations. I am frustrated that I constantly watch someone dig holes for themselves and ends up making life a lot more complicated that it needs to be.

I know my ADHD makes me focus on efficiency but it's incredibly tough being married to someone who just does and buys but never thinks. Now I am pretty certain we both have ADHD at opposite ends of the spectrum I am reluctant to just sit and talk about our issues because I know they can't just go away now without her also going to get help. She does not have the analytical skills to realise that combining our talents would make us an awesome team and is now just focussing on the negatives. 2 weeks ago out of the blue I was given the silent treatment for no reason. We have not really spoken since. 3 lovely kids and a beautiful house but a marriage made in hell.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.