Husband wants to leave

[So40]

I'm feeling so sad right now. I've got two teenage boys, 17 and 15, I love them so much but they're so challenging. The 17 year old is just a bit lazy, he'll be fine, but my 15 year old is in his gcse year and is being really challenging, like impossibly so. He's refusing to do any work and he often just refuses to go to school altogether. My husband was doing great at keeping him on side, but yesterday just completely lost his temper and yelled at my 15 year old in his face. Now my 15 year old is refusing to speak to either of us and says he hates us. Also this comes after a challenging few months with my husband where he's said he thinks we should separate. Now he says he's started looking for flats. I'm just totally broken and torn. I want to help my son, but I mostly want our lovely family back together. My husband says he never wanted children and that it's all been awful and he wants to live his life now.
How do I navigate this? I feel like everything's ruined. I'm just so sad.

It’s not a lovely family op. You and your boys will be a lovely family once the asshat that’s spoiling it removes himself. Give your son space he’ll come good in his own time. Extra pressure makes it worse IME

Interesting that he thinks leaving you will ‘give him his life back’ when he is in fact still the father of two sons!

I’m sorry things are so hard for you right now it must be just awful having your partner turn his back on you in this way and effectively say ‘you deal with it, I’m done’.

I don’t have much advice but wanted to offer some support anyway

Thank you, this is far from the first time he's said he's leaving, he's said it throughout the whole 17 years of having kids. Mainly when the second one came along and parenting got really hard. I guess I've been expecting him to leave that whole time. We've had lots of happy times and I always thought that despite everything we were a unit, but I guess not really, I've just really wanted that to be the case. It's just the kind of sad feeling that eventually what I always thing might happen is probably going to happen. It's just sad and I feel for the boys, it's not their fault.

What a difficult situation, OP!

Sorry, I just have to ask - is your husband the father of your sons?
(You write a lot about "my sons", which they are of course, but you don't write "our sons". You write for example "My husband was doing great at keeping him on side, but yesterday just completely lost his temper and yelled at my 15 year old in his face.")

Edited to add, I see now that he is the father of your sons. Sorry for asking that question.

Yes he's their Dad. I think I might be phrasing it like that because I feel protective of them at the moment.

If he wants to leave, he can leave. You can have a good life together with your sons.
For your husband to say that it's all been awful, that is a horrible thing to say!

Did he want children? Obviously if he didn’t he should have been responsible for contraception.

I hope someone will be along with more constructive advice for you OP, but I want to write that I wish you and your sons all the best!

He's a dick. If he didn't enjoy parenting, he shouldn't have had a second child.

Your teenagers are being teenagers, and are not in the wrong here.

He's an absolute prick for holding 'well I might leave' over you for 17 years. I think the time has come for you to make the decision to pull the plug, OP.

Sorry though, this is a very shit situation.