This is sort of an aside but...I am actually skeptical of people who are quick to label a firm request or statement of consequences as "an ultimatum/manipulation tactic."
When I was 19, my first boyfriend (who was 28--yes red flag!) and I agreed to what I thought was a break for the summer while I was in the process of dropping out of college/figuring out my life...when I tried to follow up with him at the end of the summer to talk and find out what our status was, he didn't respond. Emails, phone calls, no response. Even when I begged him to just please tell me if we were broken up. Finally I emailed to say that if he didn't respond, I was going to call his mom to see if she knew where he was because I didn't understand what was going on.
Now, as a non-teenager, I wouldn't respond that way (and also I would grasp that a lack of response like that = broken up). And maybe I was being manipulative because I didn't actually want to call his mom at all...and I was certainly not in a healthy place emotionally...but my email got a response.
An angry response. My ex wrote that he had been busy and "how dare I give him an ultimatum!" and how dare I involve his mother! How he hadn't thought I was "a person who would do that."
There was a whole angry tirade. And then sort of as a PS he added that he considered our relationship over and it wasn't his fault if I couldn't "get over it" and hadn't "moved on yet."
The ridiculousness of this guy seems pretty obvious now, but at the time I was devastated by his words and felt that I had really screwed things up by issuing that ultimatum. I felt like I should have known that we had broken up at the beginning of the summer and that I had been "crazy" to keep contacting him for answers. For a while I carried around a lot of shame & self-blame. I resolved to never issue an "ultimatum" again in a relationship.
And also maybe to never again voice a strong need / strong consequence? My next boyfriend was emotionally abusive.
In retrospect I wish I had actually called my first ex's mom (whom I had met and had her phone number) and made her tell her son's 19-year-old ex-girlfriend that her son was alive and well but not interested in responding. LOL.
I honestly don't think my first ex would ever have told me that we were broken up if I hadn't threatened to call his mom.
This aside will probably muddy the waters about the definition of an "ultimatum," but it's what I think of when I hear the word.