To find what DC said really sad?

Well I wasn't serious but maybe I WILL try it. Yesterday he came home in a right grump for some reason. We'd been having a lovely time playing and toys were all over the floor. I'd taken out the recycling and started dinner and was preening myself for being so considerate of him and then he came home and started scowling around and ordering the kids to tidy up. After a while of everyone scurrying about with the atmosphere completely ruined my 8 year old called me into her room and whispered 'I didn't want Daddy to come home.' 😑

Gosh, this is so familiar! I feel a constant need to smooth things over, restore a happy atmosphere and make it alright. I think DH actually experiences this as invalidating his feelings - maybe if I can't seem to achieve the 'don't care about the atmosphere, let it wash over you' I should do for him what I do for the kids - 'Oh no, there's milk all over the table! You didn't want that, now you have something else to do and you're worried we're going to be late! How frustrating!'
Wonder how he'd react.

it only comes out if he’s comfortable with you - he either shuts down or explodes, and the more familiar he is with you the more it tends to explode.

Is that a danger ahead for the children?

OK, I see your dilemma. It's not good but it's not immediate "get out of there" territory. He was able to make some changes.But people (esp men) with autism often struggle to make anything of therapy. Emotional inarticulacy kind of goes with the territory.

If he doesn't tend to direct his complaints specifically against you or the children or insult you / put you down, would it help for you to have some therapy by yourself to develop some resilience strategies for his moaning and groaning and the amateur dramatics?

Why do you thinkhe wouldn't be open to professional help? If he was OK doing therapy for anger issues that leans he isn't anti support. Was the anger issue ongoing since you met?

Honestly soooo this👆having come from a family where parents stayed together and, upon reflection, were not well suited! Yes dad was grumpy, yes life was difficult but we weren’t abused and were glad they stayed together and we had one home.

Life is not perfect, humans are not perfect. Your parents are not perfect & when you realise that you grow up. Get. Over. It!
If you chose to have children. Give them as much stability in early life as possible. I’m grateful my parents made the effort for us.

OP’s OH sounds driven to achieve so nothing is ever going to be enough. He’s always pushing on, pushing for unachievable perfection.

Don’t you think, at the back of his mind, is the realisation that everything in the future is going to have to be split 50/50 upon separation?
That alone would drive him to accrue as much financial security as possible to share around if he is a decent man.

If your life is not totally unbearable, stay OP until and the eldest is launched and you feel the youngest is sufficiently grounded and you’re able to focus on them.

I couldn't agree more strongly with this. No child should ever feel the burden of their parents' decisions in this way. That's our job.

Whatever you decide, OP, you're obviously a caring mother who is doing her best, in less than ideal circumstances, to do the right thing by her children. If your relationship with your children is anything like my own and my sibling had with our late mother, they should grow up well aware of this.

he can't keep his temper if he knocks a bottle of milk across the table 5 minutes before the school run

What happens when he loses his temper? Children can learn to ignore noise and fuss but a real loss of control is different. The sense that this adult could do anything is frightening and for good reason.

I don't have a picture of how serious this is, so I'm asking. When he loses his temper does he verbally attack and blame you or the children? Have his "dramatics" ever included anything physical e.g. punching the wall?

I agree with this - and I also think that part of the reason for this advice is that many of the middle-aged posters on MN, women in their 40s with school age kids, come from a generation when their parents were unlikely to have got divorced. When I was at school in the 80s it was still quite unusual to have divorced parents. So many posters on here are very aware of the problems of growing up in an unhappy household (and naturally want to warn others against it) but perhaps have less understanding of the alternative reality in which their parents separated, and how that might also have been difficult in different ways.

Have read all your posts, OP, though not the whole thread. I get why you're so conflicted. I picked this post to comment on because it seems to offer a small but simple (perhaps over simplifying?) way into all this, which is rather than to try and make big global decisions, look for things you can each / both do that you enjoy and find make you happy (or relatively happy in his case...). For example, there would be clear benefits for both of you in going to more gigs. OK the good vibe from that may not last too long. But if you go to them there'll be more of it so the whole temperature will be higher, if that makes sense? Even if nothing else you've at least had a good time for one night!

This also goes for your own activities, of course. Your new hobby sounds very good for you. And any opportunity to funnel him towards the equivalent for him would be good too.

Maybe what I'm getting at is, if you're really stuck about how to make the best decision, then try not making one. Just look for things that make the day better, one day at a time, for now. Wishing you all the best.

The fact you are worried and are staying in a relationship that is making no one happy because you don’t want your children to be subjected to their dads moodiness (after calling him a great father) suggests that he isn’t a great dad but one who could put the dc in danger

If he is a great dad then maybe he will be a great dad for those 3 days per week in which case everyone is happier

Aren’t you doing exactly what your husband does

In 3-4 years this will happen and the likelyhood is in 3-4 years time something will happen and what you should have done 3-4 years before will be put off again and again

There will always be reasons to not do something that might be hard but the right thing to do

Really interesting point about locking each other in our ND tendencies because you come to lean on the others strong suit and feel less and less capable.
I think this is true.
I also find I've had to push myself to reveal more of what makes me happy and create my life on that basis, which I've now found to be my super strength. And I'm grateful for that.
Its also January. Nothing positive happens this deep in.winter. And when it does, it still feels less so, because its bloody January.

To add as well - we are both a lot happier. I was worried about the time that DC would spend alone with ex as she was miserable and occasionally struggled with anger issues. She has had to work on herself without me there to pick up the pieces, she is happy and she is now a good parent for our DC.

OP, I haven't read the whole thread here and I am sure that I will not be the first person to suggest couples counselling - I might be the first person to offer a different perspective though.
My ex (wife actually, we are both female but it makes no difference to this) and I were in EXACTLY the same position as you and your DH two years ago. She had lived through the full 80s divorced parents / unsuitable parental partners / step parents and step siblings nightmare and I had a traumatic relationship with my own parents. We had essentially vowed to stay together for the DC even though we were both miserable and resentment was growing day by day.

As a last ditched attempt we went to couples therapy. It did not save our marriage in any way! It did however, help us to communicate and understand each other, to lose the resentment and (most of) the anger and to build a very amicable divorce from those lessons. We divorced a year ago and have both entered into new relationships. We are both happy. We are pretty much friends TBH. Our DC are very happy, much happier than they were and we work as a team to parent them (which we didn't before).

I am not saying that this is definitely the best solution for you - but our situations sound so startlingly similar that I wanted to share my own experience.

Yeap, all those things. I am diagnosed adhd and my background is being a fixer and I learnt long ago that my needs are wrapped arojnd meeting other people's needs. And yes, understanding ND differences helps me to take things less personally but at the same time I had to go through a stage of realising that no amount of my expert Fixing was going to change the fundamentals.
And it is a cold and brutal reality to have to bump up against.
What I find especially hard is that he will never know how much of my own self, energy, resources I put into him and our relationship and our parenting everyday. He will never see or fully understand or truly love me for it either.
He does appreciate it, as im extremely vocal about everything I feel (part of the problem too no doubt).
But right now with 3 children, the youngest being 6 and with their own ND spiciness , its what's needed.
Doesn't mean I don't question it on a frequent basis.

I do however talk about all our differences with our children. So I will express that Papa struggles with noise because of his different brain. But its not because of them and they haven't done anything wrong and help them to not feel burdened by his inability and give them understanding rather than confusion.
But Jesus man. Its not a damn picnic.

No advice OP, but I just want to commend you for your exceptionally thoughtful analysis of your situation, and for making your children the priority in your decision making.
It is rare on MN to see such nuanced thinking.

You say he is a great parent because he play fights, teases and tells jokes to his dc

If you are looking to the future where you are still together in 3 or 4 years time. I think you might start to have problems with your dc

The older one will be approaching her teenage years and what supposedly makes him a good father now isn’t going to work in a very short time.

That will be the time you find out how unhappy your choice to stay with their father has made them. I think the years of sweeping everything under the carpet and trying to keep the status quo could end up blowing up in your face and you end up eventually losing your adult children as they don’t want to come back to the miserable atmosphere in their family home

Can you not see that your children aren’t going to stay children. They are going to grow up and make their own choices about how they lead their lives based on doing the opposite of what made them unhappy growing up.