Can rarely bring myself to say a person's feelings are wrong, or their decisions in a relationship. If tyrannical control is what she needs to be happy with this guy, and it works for her, great. Clearly cheating is a massive deal to her since she is having this reaction, so that she is trying to find any way at all to stay with him is a sign of love. If he loves her so much that he's willing to accept what amounts to a massive punishment over almost nothing, well good for him too. To me, it seems like their relationship is careening toward destruction and they would be better off splitting to save as many sanity tokens as they can by splitting asap. I doubt she'll be able to really let this go, and I doubt he'll be able to stop himself from repeating some version of it again.