Well, as SSMGuy found out (and I did, too, if you go read my original thread) if you bring up divorce without the resolve to do it, then you haven't really given an ultimatum. You only reinforce that you're weak and you'll put up with anything.
If you genuinely will not divorce under any circumstances, it would be better not to bluff.
I don't think of my tolerance of my situation as a weakness, and I will not allow myself to force divorce out of a fear that I'd otherwise be "weak". That's the sort of thing people with great insecurities do -- they do the most extreme things (violence, guns) to try to show they're not afraid of taking "risks" and to "get resolution" quickly.
As for allowing my wife to manipulate me, you could see it that way. But I'm not in a game of power struggle and figuring out how to come out on top.
There are a lot of other innocent people involved in my situation, and I pretty much automatically resist and view with suspicion the typically American advice to "just divorce" to show them you're boss, etc. I've heard way too much American advice about how divorce is clean and such and how the kids all get used to it and it's good for them too. My wife is a child of divorce, and her parents even did it very cleanly, and are still all on good terms. But the effect of that divorce is still baggage my wife has to deal with, and that too came up in therapy.
I "love" the way Americans have lined up a lot of psychologists to put parental self-realization as a priority ahead of their kids in recent decades. And when parents pay for therapists to tell them they should go ahead and divorce because the kids will be happy as long as the parents are happy. Talk about a load of BS. And might that have something to do with who's paying the shrink? I'll bet it would be a different advice if the kids were paying for the shrink! The fact is, kids DO NOT automatically feel OK about their parents sleeping with other people JUST BECAUSE they have divorce and re-marriage paperwork that makes it all official, kosher, and holy. To a lot of kids, it feels wrong that parents sleep with new people, sometimes regardless of whether they do it in a marriage, or after a divorce. I know I'll get pushback from people on this, and I'm familiar with all the circumstances, but the fact of the matter is, I can quote you from a lot of people, like a female friend of mine who is still in a rage over her step mother and the way she wormed herself into her father's life. The way she talks about it, now even 15 years after the divorce, is virtually identical to the way she might have talked about it had her father had an affair on the side. In her case, a divorce did not make it nice and tidy and clean at all.
