I am a woman 'like this', my mother is a woman 'like this'. I'm lining up with the OP because she's obviously so fricking confused. The confusion arises as she is keeping her side of the bargain - like she's been taught, and he just isn't (probably how he has been taught). Then the roof falls in on her world and she's just trying forlornly and poignantly to hold bits of it up. It makes me think of Jackie Kennedy in Dallas instinctively reaching over the back of the car for bits of JFK's brain to try to pack them back into his skull. What's a woman to do?
Yes, of course she needs to get rid of this awful tosspot, and she now has three (?) threads asking the same question over and over again. It may be extreme but it is understandable.
Yeah it probably is about feminism, because, frankly, feminism has hardly made a dent in the culture that we breathe.
Feminism hasn't exactly taken over the world, simontower2. Which is tragic. Our whole culture dictates that women are either blamed or they are taught to blame themselves for pretty much anything that goes wrong in family/relationships. Even if a man goes off and fucks other women for years on end, people still look to the wronged wife to find the reason - was she giving him enough sex, had she let herself go? The wife herself feels shame and asks herself what she has done to make him act like a shit. The husband finds all sorts of explanations as to why he has been a shit, mainly predicated on her not being good enough at one level or another. A policeman in Rochdale finds a 12 year old girl being raped by ten men in an abandoned warehouse and arrests her for being drunk and disorderly. An arsehole football player beats his girlfriend up and the world asks 'Why did she stay' not, 'Why the fuck did he do that?' A woman on Merseyside rings the police, what, 17 times to tell them she thinks her ex-husband will kill her. Oh and guess what, he did!
Our whole culture values men more than women and we all breathe that air from the day we're born.