I understand OP,
I am the kind of person who hates confrontation too and I will usually avoid it where possible. The thing is however that it is impossible to avoid ALL confrontation when with a partner, in fact confrontation is necessary at times so that you may enforce boundaries and not be walked all over.
I’m pretty laid back as person but one of the few things I can’t stand in life is people who are unpredictable. It took me until I was in my 30s to understand why I would dislike or be wary of certain people for what seemed to be no reason at all. I used to feel like I was the unreasonable one. That was until it dawned on me that the reason that I was wary was because their behaviour was either unpredictable or irrational to me. I think it’s very easy to underestimate just how important it is to know where you stand with a person, to be able to trust that you are safe with them and that disagreements shouldn’t escalate to a point where you feel scared or fearful of that person’s response.
For you I think it’s not only that your DH can lose his temper, it’s the things he can lose his temper at. If those things don’t seem rational or predictable to you, so of course going to make you feel wary. There are certain things everyone in life can understand someone losing their temper over, however if someone can also lose it over random and insignificant things, like say a light being left on or the pepper being put back in the wrong place then your in a position of just never knowing what might set them off, even if these instances a few and far between, they are not predictable and they are not understandable. This leaves you, and rightly so, feeling wary and unbalanced and untrusting that your DH’s reaction to any given thing, because you just never know when it’s coming.
For example; something terrible happens where you expect him to lose his temper but perhaps he doesn’t. Something minor happens and yet he flies off the handle. This sort of thing is bound to have you scratching your head because as I say you’ve no reliable indicator as to what sort of things may have him lose his temper or not, which is very destabilising for you. This is most likely where your fear and anxiety comes from, not because you can attribute it to some terrible act or violence towards you, but because you simply don’t know what is coming or when, and when someone is so unpredictable what’s coming could indeed be the worst thing, you just never know!. You’ll have no idea what to expect or when to expect it because he gives no indicators, no warning signs and there is no predictability to the things that may cause this behaviour. Therefore, the only thing to do, which is what you have been doing (and probably unknowingly) all this time, is walking round on eggshells trying to keep everything calm because anything, ANYTHING could set him off and when he goes into such a rage it’s so explosive that your never sure whether he will just shout, break things, or put his fist through your face, EVEN if he has never done that before! The point is, is that you don’t know, and you don’t trust that he won’t do that EVER. It’s like you have a sixth sense telling you that if he was pushed far enough that’s exactly what he would do!