I'm worried my relationship is petering out, and I just wanted some views really.
We are both 46, I have two primary school children, he has none. Neither ever married. We don't live together.
5-6 years ago we both exited long term relationships.
His was 15 years duration. He went into that relationship as an early Twenties man to a woman several years older who already had two just turned teenagers. She decided she didn't want more children, so he remained childless. He left her because he felt it had run it's course.
Mine was 7 years duration, and of some quite considerable DV. I finally left shortly after my youngest was born.
We both then met eachother a few years later and have been together for 3 years come this May.
Our format has been this: every weekend he stays at mine from late eve Saturday to early eve Sun, and occassionally vice versa.
We occassionally get family babysitters for a night out just the two of us, perhaps every few months.
I see him for coffee one evening a week whilst my child is at Brownies. My other child accompanies us.
Since I have started work, we have managed to meet up on average once a week for lunch or coffee after work, for around an hour or so before I pick the kids up from school.
He has been on holiday with us for 5 days, but it was a little fraught. We all get to know the real person when living under the same roof, and it's unfortunate that holiday he learnt that I'm prone to panic attacks in crowded, enclosed places and games arcades. I didn't deal well with the situation and took it out on him, accusing him of not giving me 'space' to have a moment.
He later explained his previous holidays with girlfriends have all been fraught.
Anyway, we have been through a few things together. He lost his brother recently, indeed he was present at the time so traumatic for him. Then I lost our (unplanned) baby, then he had a heart attack a few months later.
You'd think is would bring us closer together, yet it hasn't, and Ifeel that because we don't see eachother very often, we can't ever achieve the kind of closeness that would develop this relationship in the usual way.
We've talked lightly about living together inthe future, but he's admitted he's very happy with his current lifestyle (coachouse flat, lots of gadgets, works from home, no real commitments other than his close family) and of course it's the first time he's lived alone as he went straight from his Mum's the above LTR in his early Twenties. So I do appreciate this.
But lately, I feel more and more like a fwb.
He puts enormous effort into taking us out on day trips and activities with the children, but the routine of staying over one night a week, enjoying eachother's company, having sex, and then returning Sunday evening, with no significant communication during the week other than a few texts, and no phone calls (neither of us are phone communication type people ... even though bizarrely it's my job to work on the phone all day 
and he does phone his ex girlfriend of the above LTR every so often and have longish chats about nothing in particular with her).
How can I develop a degree of closeness in this relationship to move it forward a bit?
I wouldn't like to still just be dating (sleeping over once a week) in 1 or 2 or 3 more year's time, it just doesn't feel very, I dunno, grow up, or conventional, or whatever. I feel like I'm in a teenage dating scenario, but I'm a grown up woman of 46 with two kids.
What's your opinion of this relationship?