Alpha, it is all a process. Whilst MN is 'right' when they say this behaviour is not conducive to a healthy r, the person being not treated well has to get there in their own time. It is a slow whirring of the mental and emotional cogs, to incorporate the new reality, find out what 'we' do to facilitate it, decide where 'our' line is - and prepare for a new life!
I was saying to the OW in the momentous thread, (because her 'why' is actually the same as my 'why' - WHY did we choose this/put up with it?), that coming to a slow realisation takes time. First you are blind. Then it hurts. Then that hurt moves you.
I know for certain that I was taught as a child 'your needs are very deeply inconvenient, have no needs!' and my parents were v neglectful. So when my H started treating me as 'less than' there was no 'me' to be outraged and resist. I had been trained years back. Small everday example: instead of holding my hand in town, he would hold Ds hand and I would trot along 3 paces behind - and not once would he look back or acknowledge my existence. So huge message of disrespect and uncaring that I would say to myself our marital message 'oh, he is right to love D' - without realising that he was in fact making the children feel very unsafe because we SHOULD have been a loving unit over them, and he was modelling disrespect to women to them.
When I went in shattered IC listened to me for 1/2 and hour and then said 'you do realise his affair is the final, unacceptably hurtful part of a PATTERN? It has taken me 4 years to 'get' this.
when I saw the email to OW on 12 March 2013 (finding her existence was 10 May 2009), sent the day before he told me how much he regretted his affair, that was really the only moment for me when I stopped thinking about conflicting loyalties (kids, assets, his beautiful brokenness [chumplady.com]) and said to myself clearly: if you stay now, you are actively participating in your own mistreatment [and nobody is to blame for that but you].
I have been told that immature men like this (sorry) 'split' women into madonnas and whores, and I absolutely know this has happened to me and it happened at the birth of our first. I became 'Mummy' and housewife, and his OW is beautiful, caring, exotic, wondrous feminine.