Will, you are wrong. Here's why: You’re treating preference as if it were a separate source of law. It isn’t. It’s what remains when a household matter admits more than one lawful course and someone has to impose one. That someone is the husband. The question is not whether she likes the course. No one can command an interior liking. The question is exterior: when a real alternative in the home must be settled, and neither course is against the law of God, may she refuse the act because she would have chosen the other? No. Her disagreement does not cancel a precept that belongs to his office. Aquinas is clear that inferiors are not the ordinary judges of a superior’s command, and that after the Fall she may have to obey even against her own will. Headship itself is prelapsarian. What the Fall adds is the burden, not the office. Trent already states the scope: she is to yield in all things not inconsistent with Christian piety, with a willing and ready obedience. “Willing and ready” is the mode. “Not inconsistent with Christian piety” is the limit on the object. Piety is not a synonym for “only the uniquely correct prudential option,” and it is not a wife’s power to reclassify a decision as “mere preference” and walk away. Pius XI does not repeal that. He specifies it. “Not every wish” excludes caprice and commands with no domestic object. Companion, not servant, and not a minor, exclude child-rule and servant-status. None of those clauses create a veto over a lawful household fork. If two houses, two budgets, two residences, or two legitimate ways of ordering the home are in play, settling the fork is government. That the husband also prefers one of the options does not empty the precept. That she prefers the other does not empty his office.That is why your graphic does not hold. Once a lawful household choice exists, you already admit he may bind her when she would have chosen otherwise. Calling that “prudence” rather than “preference” does not change the exterior obligation. The act binds because he settled a matter of the home, not because the option was uniquely rational and empty of preference. In the cases that actually constitute headship, “Error A” and “Catholic teaching” name the same thing: his decision binds unless it is against the law of God. The supposed third box only survives if you treat as the test case a wish with no household object. That is not the definition of marital authority. It is an edge example used to make a real last word look like a blank cheque. Therefore, on the object of the office—the government of the home—the distinction is without a difference.