I agree, but the problem is that attempting to understand Spike's actions in the context of the previous Buffy/Spike relationship dynamic comes close to blaming a woman for her (near) rape, which is horrible. I blame the writers for creating this mess in the first place. There is no real-life equivalent to the situation, and the metaphor is so mixed--one episode Buffy is domestically abusing Spike, then the metaphor is that they're "in the closet" and Tara's encouraging them to come out, then it's that Spike is the abusive (near) rapist. The writing that season was so inconsistent--the various writers all clearly had different ideas about what was going on with Spike and Buffy, and the resulting mess ended up hurting a lot of people who identified with Spike and who identified with Buffy.