Aha! If you're going to bring up the mattress thing, remember exactly how that went down. She chastised him for trying to take care of her, like he always does, which is why he always ends up resenting the women he's with, and therefore makes it much easier to rationalize leaving them in the end. Wilson isn't a "mwahahaha" type of bastard. He's not evil. He usually rationalizes that he's doing the right thing, (you can see this pretty obviously in the Tritter debacle; even Cameron sees through it) but that whole process was sewn up in his emotional manipulation. Amber was just the first girlfriend smart enough to recognize it, and call bullshit.

Wilson being House's ATM just fits nicely into his own pathology, which is the need to be needed. Sure, House manipulated him there, but when you compare the number of times House manipulates Wilson with the number of time Wilson manipulates House, it's still pretty uneven.

Obvious aggression, sure. Wilson definitely holds back obvious aggression. He normally relieves it in much more subtle ways. (And the stuff with Bonnie, and the cancer patient, none of that had anything to do with House. And the ongoing thank you bet was mentioned in the finale of the first season, so it's probably been going on quite awhile pre-series. Getting Cuddy to make the bet with House to detox also happened in the first season. The Tritter thing was an example of something House emphatically did not want to happen. Most of Wilson's manipulation comes down to him needing to be the person everyone depends on. And not just in the "occasionally needs a shoulder to cry on" way. In the "I'm so emotionally invested in you my world might crumble without you" way.) Wilson's a bastard, with or without House. They wouldn't be friends if he weren't.