Why the Left Looks Like a Big Hypocrite in the Sanford Affair

By JoAnn Wypijewski, The Nation. Posted July 3, 2009.

Of course, there is terrific joy among journalists. Nothing sells papers like a good sex scandal. But it isn't just business or just the general degradation of the political culture that has encouraged almost everyone in public life to seat themselves in moral judgment. It is also the resistance, forty years after Woodstock and Stonewall, forty-plus after the Summer of Love and the long debates on liberation and desire, to look love and marriage plainly in the face as the often embarrassing, sometimes tragic, messy, reckless, ecstatic, devastating, humdrum human endeavors that they are.

It is as if so many years of self-help, so many versions of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, so many couples counselors and Oprah shows and feminist promises of pleasure, so many exhortations from the Dr. Phils of the world that Yes, you too can be happy; you just have to want it, have rendered many people stupid, believing in uncomplicated happily-ever-afters, if only one works hard enough at it.

Into this multiply-reinforced delusion, the Sanford affair has arrived as a clarifying wind. Like most men, the governor didn't think the years of correspondence with Chapur, the regular exchange of views and observations, the small change of life passing between them, meant anything. Who knows what had become of conversation between himself and Jenny, bounded by concerns for the children and the property, politics and the next campaign? And who knows that his pen pal didn't actually help the marriage work for a time, like a release valve, allowing the homely business to prosper. He and Jenny always seemed so happy, people have said. Maybe they were. Maybe Maria had a part in that. If Jenny had had a boyfriend at arm's length, maybe it would still be working.

As the governor tapped the innocent e-mails, the ones before he "crossed the ultimate line," he probably believed distance was a prophylactic. But it was a leaky one, because by the time he and Chapur consummated their affair, they were longtime intimates, "the heart," as he said, making its insistent claims, and all that was left was to negotiate the terms of surrender or renunciation.

Clearly Sanford thought those were the only options, as once returned to South Carolina in the summer of 2008 he mounted his heavy equipment and went about digging holes on his plantation in a frenzy of frustration. On the one hand there was love, on the other the life; maybe he needed both and could imagine no way to reconcile the two. Now Sanford's friend and spiritual adviser Cubby Culbertson says that the Sanfords are no longer linked by feelings, that they persist in their marriage "out of obedience instead of out of passion." It is easy enough to scoff at that, easy enough to say one or the other should walk away, and maybe they should. But what is compelling about this story is its familiarity. People are foolish sometimes, or wiser than they know; sometimes they're trapped, or fearful, usually both. People who should walk away never do, and sometimes it's not so simple to say their reasons are baseless. Only a misanthrope would damn them with irony and condescension.

It would be nice to say that there is some political solution for all the Jennies and Marks and Marias, some variant on self-help in the form of open marriage, polyamory and the like. Some answer. Some sexual accommodation that vanquishes the possibility of pain. And there is, sometimes. But not always. Sometimes sex does change everything.

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JoAnn Wypijewski, a former senior editor of The Nation, is based in New York City.

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