He'd go out every night looking for himself... and on the way... he found Ruth, Gladys, Rosemary... and Irving. I guess you can say we broke up because of artistic differences. He saw himself as alive...and I saw him dead.
As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.
Examples:
A common theme in country music.
A common plot element in crime television dramas, although the murderers are less likely to be seen sympathetically in such stories.
Played with in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where the plot goes both ways - a male character sees himself cheated on, murders both parties, and commits suicide, then a female character goes through the exact same scenario and reacts the same way. In actuality, both characters were being caught up in the psychic playback of events that happened to someone else in the past. And that someone else was not presented as justified, but as disturbed.
Unpleasantly required as part of the Goblin newbie zone in World of Warcraft regardless of gender - you have a romantic partner, that romantic partner then leaves you for someone else, and you have to hunt them down and rip out their cheating heart.
Mind you, the one they've left you for is also trying to sell you into slavery, so it's a bit more understandable.
The School Days media series of games, anime and manga have this going on in some of the bad endings, when it's not Murder the Hypotenuse.
Woman kills Man
Three of the "Six Merry Murderesses of the Cook County Jail" from Chicago fall under this trope. In fact, the former trope namer (He Had It Coming) comes from their chorus in the "Cell Block Tango," where they give their accounts of how their husbands died for "crimes" like popping their gum. Only Hunyak turns out to be innocent.
Despite being the original trope namer, the show doesn't really give the impression that what these women did was acceptable... just that they can manage to manipulate events to get away with it.
The extended version of Garth Brooks's "The Thunder Rolls" (though the video depicts the husband as being abusive as well as adulterous):
She runs back down the hallway
To the bedroom door
She reaches for the pistol
Kept in the dresser drawer
Tells the lady in the mirror
He won't do this again
'Cause tonight will be the last time
She'll wonder where he's been
The first published version of the Murder Ballad "Frankie and Johnny" ("He was her man/But he done her wrong") appeared in 1904, making this Older Than Radio.
This trope is the entirety of Oxygen's Snapped. Most episodes covers a Real Life case of an abused and/or cheated-on woman who killed her husband (sometimes father). They try not to paint the women in a sympathetic light, but the show still has a "You go girl" kind of feel.
Sometimes the husband is a saint and the woman is simply tired of being married but doesn't want to go through a divorce, or wants his life insurance policy, or the woman was actually a sociopath. These episodes don't count, though - they're just plain ordinary murder and not relevant to this trope. Women do sometimes kill people for reasons other than "bad men".
Lil Kim has killed at least 2 boyfriends in her songs.
Anna Russell's songs "Dripping With Gore" and "Two Time Man" are (mild) parodies of this trope as used in country music.
"If You Hadn't, But You Did" from the musical revue Two on the Aisle has a verse beginning in soap-opera-style bathos and ending with a gunshot. It then turns into an angry List Song running down the reasons for saying goodbye to her husband, most of them having names like Geraldine and Kate.
Man kills Woman
Garth Brooks's "Papa Loved Mama" is presented as comedy. This version is sympathetic to both the lonely, cheating mother and the cuckolded, murderous father.
Papa loved Mama
Mama loved men
Mama's in the graveyard
Papa's in the pen
The ambiguous ending of George Jones' "Radio Lover" can be interpreted as this, involving a cuckolded DJ husband who comes home to catch his wife in bed with another man, and then sings the song's chorus, "The last words they ever heard."
Subverted in The Shawshank Redemption: Andy's wife was cheating on him, and he goes to jail for her murder. He's innocent, though.
The rap song Scandalous Hoes II, which ends with murdering the woman for cheating, presented as completely justified
Possibly subverted in The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets' "Jimmy the Squid". Jimmy is accused of killing his mate for sleeping with another squid. He says he's innocent.
Tom Jones' Delilah.
Hey Joe, recorded by a number of artists
Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger
Warren Zevon's A Bullet For Ramona
Weirdly appears on Rome when Vorenus finds out his grandson is in fact his wife Niobe's son by another man. According to Roman custom at the time it was not only Vorenus' right to kill her for her infidelity, but it was also what honor demanded (and Vorenus is constantly shown to put Honor Before Reason). He grabs a knife but doesn't seem like he will be able to actually kill her, so she flings herself off a balcony and takes her own life as a final act of love.
In Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol," this is the condemned prisoner's crime.
He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved And murdered in her bed.
The third verse of Dr Dre and Eminem's "Guilty Conscience" has the two arguing as a man's conscience on whether or not to kill his cheating wife and her lover (Dre tries to talk him out of it, but Slim Shady is goading him to go ahead). They both agree to do it after Slim calls Dre out on his own past ("You gonna take advice from somebody who slapped Dee Barnes?").
Appears to be the case in Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds "We Came Along This Road". The song's lyrics start with "I left by the back door, with my wife's lover's smoking gun" and then describe the protagonist going on the run.
Richard Marx, "Hazard", maybe. The male character's accused of it, but the truth is intentionally ambiguous.
Played with in Reba McEntire's "The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia". A man finds out that his wife's been the town bicycle while he's been gone, and goes to kill her and his friend who she was last cheating on him with. He gets arrested for it, and as the title suggests, gets the death penalty. Subversion: the husband didn't do it. His little sister got to the cheating wife and the friend first.
Attempted Murder
In Adam's Rib, a wife shoots her husband after finding another woman in his arms, but he survives. Her defense attorney, Amanda Bonner, gets the jury to excuse her actions under the Double Standard grounds that a man shooting at an unfaithful wife would not be judged so harshly.
