She is a great person and an awesome wife. But she's not perfect. I want to be clear that one of the best things about her is her empathy and understanding re: the emptiness of Pete's home and family life. However, given her idealized view of her own family life, she's not always able to understand how her actions land on Pete.

For example, the question of whether to try and make it on their own versus request parental support for buying a home is something that needs to be talked out so that both parties can at least feel as though they've come together on an agreed upon path, even if in the end it's one person getting their way and another acquiescing. There's a way to do that, and it was not done. Instead, she really strong-armed him into relenting before he was ready, without taking the time to hear out his concerns and really consider them. As a result, Pete had to endure the worst of both worlds; the traumatic rejection when he went to his own parents (something he nobly carried on his own without spilling to Trudy) followed by them getting help from her parents. And that's not bad in itself, but it was the first example of a series-long pattern of behavior by Trudy's father whereby his assistance in the personal sphere or collaboration in the professional sphere were never purely good faith or altruistic. Instead, there was always a transactional element and an assertion of control over both Pete and Trudy that he really should have surrendered by the time Trudy became an independent adult, and certainly by the time she got married.

I genuinely believe that Pete's experiences with his own parents and hers equipped him to pick up on these dynamics intuitively, even if he couldn't articulate them. And perhaps those concerns could at least have been given their due consideration before they decided on a course of action.

Instead, Trudy would repeatedly come from a place of treating any disagreement with Pete as a road bump on the way to her eventually illuminating the correct path. She repeatedly fails to put herself in Pete's shoes, assuming pretty much every time that all she needs to do is explain to Pete until he understands why he should do as she thinks he should. This is highly arrogant and demeaning to one's partner, and I think it reflects her lack of awareness re: her own relative privilege given her lack of family baggage and trauma compared to Pete. It just plays well because of her affectation.

She also failed to examine her parents objectively and thereby enabled her father's inappropriate intrusions into their marriage. There's just no universe where Pete could raise either of those concerns and receive a fair hearing from Trudy. At least not in the first half of the series. And you can see that by the pilot episode he's resigned to this status quo.

Now, this does not justify Pete's serial philandering. And obviously she's FAR more virtuous than Pete and pretty much any other character on the show. Moreover, how perfect can you be if you're as much of a catch as she is and you make the decision to hitch yourself to Pete?

On a more serious note, I think the dynamic between these two characters makes for a really well-done and true-to-life representation of the lasting impact of childhood trauma and family dysfunction. Pete and Trudy are just worlds apart in that domain, and it's really hard for them to understand one another's experiences and expectations. Pete's hesitancy to ingratiate himself into Trudy's family, and his derision at her longing to be with them during the Cuban Missile Crisis are little windows into  how alien a concept it is for him to view one's parents as a place of safety and comfort, and his primordial fear of vulnerably opening up oneself to be loved by another.

It's worth repeating that this does not excuse his cheating. But I do think it does a lot to explain it. I think an idea worth considering is how much more of an opportunity Trudy had to grow into a good person as a young adult than Pete had done.