Forever is a long time. Sometimes you love someone, and you build a life with them, and then over the years your love for them goes away, and then you fall in love with someone else. It is a fact of human nature that this sometimes happens. If love were always guaranteed to last indefinitely, it would probably be a simpler, easier world. Heck, if we could decide how long love lasted, it would be a much easier world. But until we make the technological breakthrough that lets us alter human nature, we are stuck with the possibility of falling in love with someone new.
Which is why I think William Saletan has the best take on the Mark Sanford scandal:
Has Mark Sanford lost his mind? Doesn't he understand that you never, ever, ever admit that you loved the other woman? That you still have strong feelings for her? That part of you wishes you could leave your job and family and go with her?
The cynical interpretation of Sanford's heresy would be that in his case, the appeasement calculus goes the other way: He needs to convey love for his mistress rather than his wife, because his mistress could do him greater harm, perhaps by spilling more details of the relationship. But I don't buy that. Sanford has always been an idealist. A weirdo, but an idealist. I think he loved this other woman. I think he still does. And he won't belittle or renounce that love because it was, and is, something real.
I feel awful for Sanford's wife and kids. But compared with all the cheaters who have gone before him, I don't think less of him for genuinely loving the other woman or for admitting it. It beats the hell out of seducing somebody, kicking her to the curb, and pretending she was nothing to you—or really meaning it.
Now, Sanford did disappear without a trace for a week, and he probably misappropriated government funds to carry on his affair. Those derelictions of his gubenatorial duties may disqualify him as an officeholder. But regarding his affair, I just feel sorry for him. This is no Silvio Berlusconi, holding orgy parties at his pleasure palace, or Eliot Spitzer, sneaking out at night to bang hookers. If we were to see Sanford's "Maria," she'd probably be plain and middle-aged (after all, she's long married as well). And check out these excerpts from Sanford's love letters:
"You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light - but hey, that would be going into sexual details ...
"Three and finally, while all the things above are all too true - at the same time we are in a hopelessly - or as you put it impossible - or how about combine and simply say hopelessly impossible situation of love. How in the world this lightening strike snuck up on us I am still not quite sure. As I have said to you before I certainly had a special feeling about you from the first time we met, but these feelings were contained and I genuinely enjoyed our special friendship and the comparing of all too many personal notes ...
"Lastly I also suspect I feel a little vulnerable because this is ground I have never certainly never covered before - so if you have pearls of wisdom on how we figure all this out please let me know... In the meantime please sleep soundly knowing that despite the best efforts of my head my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul.”
Sanford's pathetic, desperate longing for a woman who is separated from him by boundaries of tradition and propriety and social convention is less like a sex scandal and more like a sad art-house movie. It inspires no disgust, only pity for the man and sadness for the human condition.
And maybe a little happiness, to see that up-tight Republican governors from the South can write letters like that.
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