Yesterday Sanford gave a long, rambling interview to the AP in which he explained, to his own satisfaction, why he had an affair.  In the course of it, he said:

 

"“This was a whole lot more than a simple affair; this was a love story,” he told The A.P. “A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”"

 

 

Whether or not any of these stories actually describes Sanford's situation, they do describe what Sanford believes to be his state of mind.  And what he thinks is that he's trapped in a fairy tale, or a movie romance, or a country song.  ("What if you're married to somebody else when the right one comes along?")  Governor Sanford believes in the One True Love, the one person destined for you by Fate.  If you're in a relationship when you meet the One True Love, that just proves that the old relationship, retroactively, wasn't One or True.  If there's only one perfect person for you, then of course everyone else is subtly wrong.

 

The critical flaw in the myth is the word "one".  Leaving aside the option of polyamory, clearly unacceptable to a conservative Christian, "one" divides the human race into binaries.  Not only are there Good people and Bad people, but there is the One Love and there's everybody else. There's the person who can wake you with a single kiss, and then there are the also-rans. In practice, the world turns out to be more complicated than that. 

 

Nobody is the One True Love all the time.  Juliet would eventually have told Romeo, "one more damned sonnet and I'm throwing the complete works of Petrarch at you."  I'm sure Nelson and Lady Hamilton had the occasional knock-down drag-out fight.  You don't recognize a True Love because that person is flawless; you recognize that person with all of his or her flaws.  On good days, you embrace those flaws tenderly; on bad days they make you want to, according to temperament, murder that person, drink heavily, or scream your fury to the heavens.

 

It's easy to be a Soul Mate at long distance.  A long-distance Soul Mate never has to cope with you when you've come home exhausted from work and the kids still have to be fed, entertained, and their homework checked.  Every single person on this earth has features that grow stale with repetition, that are less than charming, that fail to fully satisfy.  When you fall in love with somebody, you're falling in love with a package, a package that is full of wonderful things, of hidden things.  As you slowly unwrap the package over a lifetime, you are going to discover the occasional coprolith.  It is a terrible mistake to compare that coprolith with the shiny wrapped package next door; that, too, contains a mixture.

 

My husband is practically perfect in every way.   I cannot imagine a better person to live with.   And should I -- absit omen! -- bump into someone who appears to be such a person, I will remember that I'm deep into my husband's wrappings, that he's deep into mine, and that those years of mutual understanding and respect are more valuable than the prettiest silver paper and velvet.  That's where the "True" part comes in.