I feel it’s unfair to characterize the wife character as a doormat in this case. She stayed with him because he repented, he made amends, and he changed.

The author’s husband is unrepentant and entitled. If she had stayed with him after that moment, she would have been a doormat. But she made her plans, and she left. He had to have known it was coming after that talk. He had all that time to choose to engage, to examine how his actions were affecting his family, to self reflect and reprioritize. He chose to play the victim and malign or spread grievances amongst their family and friends.

I’m glad she left him and is leading a life beyond cleaning up his failures and holding it all together at the sacrifice of her own peace of mind and chances to succeed. I also understand her rage at the character, and yours. For too long this has been the only model for women. Sacrifice and hold men in the limelight for the good your family. It’s a false dichotomy the majority of the time, though, in that it doesn’t benefit the family so much as it benefits and shields the husband from the consequences of his neglectful actions towards the family in pursuit of personal glory and pie in the sky ambitions. The family then becomes the ones who absorb those consequences.

It’s not unfair to challenge and put in jeopardy a spouse’s position in a family when they consistently act for themselves and never the family all the while depending on that same family to carry their dead weight. The question is, how long and how many chances are reasonable before you should have that hard conversation? I think that’s the consideration of the individual — no one else should make that determination. The last thing is whether or not you can accept and act upon the answer you receive and not subcomb to filtered or ambiguous answers; to not let your hopes and perception of investment lure you into allowing more of the same. Of course, you already have to find the strength to shirk cultural expectations and that’s another avenue of head games many 'victimized' husbands like the author’s will readily try to exploit.