100%. The saddest part is that a society like that naturally encourages men to behave like the duke and MC’s father—they would be the norm, as much as the story tried to play off the father as egregious.
That’s also why it’s so unrealistic that the MC would’ve hid at the the 2ML’s family home. A woman in her situation would NOT have played hard to get—after the duke had confessed his love and desire to not get divorced, any sane woman in her position (and especially a woman of her sentiment) would’ve immediately acted to secure that certain and stable future.
It would have been fascinating to truly lean into Roxina’s insane choice as being a symptom of her mental illness. That instead of jumping off the roof or hanging herself, she chooses a social and financial suicide in running away because her circumstances pushed her to a breaking point. Thus, if Antour wants to bring her home as his wife again, he has to fully accept his complicity in her oppression and meaningfully change.
And I’ll accept that this is an unrealistic expectation for a manhwa that just wants to have sexy rich people engage with dom-sub play, but Predatory Marriage is a smutty manhwa that does actually acknowledge how crazy and self-destructive a noble woman would have to be to call on a gigolo and sacrifice her marriage to a wealthy, albeit abusive man. It IS possible, is all I’m saying.
Despite how happy everyone ends, this story is fundamentally a tragedy. Not a single woman in this entire world has autonomy. Even the FL is quick to point out that the one decision she thought she got to make freely was actually manipulated from behind by her husband the entire time.
And I’m not saying Antour and Roxina aren’t genuinely happy by the end of the story. But they are never and can never be equal in this relationship. She may tie him up in bed and he may willingly call his mistress, but everyone knows that at the end of the day he could legally sell her off whenever he wanted to. It’s only because the duke had a change of heart that the duchess isn’t dead in a ditch somewhere.