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It was an affair that started online, one of those flirtatious friendships between people who live far away and are very different that turned into a level of honest communication in can be hard to have in everyday life, in real time. Two people far away who emailed and chatted and shared their hearts, taking about the love they wished for and were seeking but did not have and how this chance to connect online, through chats and photos and emails, gave them each something that felt really good.
Only as time went on, their relationship moved into the real world. What had been a dream connection, a cyber-love, turned into a real love. A love that, because it was so unexpected by the two people involved, became even more treasured for its passion. A love that proved to him something essential was missing from his life till now, and proved to her that deep, transformative love still existed.
Only how could these two long-distance lovers allow their relationship to evolve? Living two different lives, thousands of miles apart, how could this successful man, married, a public figure with kids, and this beautiful woman, divorced, with children, and a career woman herself, figure out a way to go forward that would not destroy everything else they had?
The plot of a Danielle Steel novel? The latest plot line from The Hills? Jodi Picoult’s newest short story?
Nope, this is the story of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, a proposed Republican Vice Presidential candidate in the 2008 elections, and his relationship with Maria Belen Chapur, an Argentinean divorcee and television reporter for whom Sanford went “disappearrado” for four days in June 2009 when he flew to Buenos Aires to see her without telling anyone where he was going and without leaving anyone else in charge of his state (What if he had been Vice President and done that?)
“He’s hiking the Appalachian Trail,” his (hapless) staff told the press, though it soon came out Sanford has flown south with the knowledge of his wife, determined to end an illicit relationship that fed his heart but conflicted with both his marriage vows and his morals.
Women—and men—in South Carolina are flocking to support Jenny Sanford, the Governor’s wife, who told press she asked her husband to move out two weeks before his trip to Argentina, and who refused to play the supportive wife at a press conference with her (repentant) spouse, instead telling the media, “His career is not a concern of mine. He's going to have to worry about that. I'm worried about my family and the character of my children.”
A recent profile in the Washington Post painted Jenny Sanford as an adultery survivor, refusing to condone her husband’s mistake. However, reports that Gov Sanford has known and corresponded with Maria Belen Chapur for many years, the friendship turning physical in 2008, makes me wonder how much Jenny Sanford knew and condoned, and how much this relationship was conducted with her awareness.
Certainly, the media reported that Sanford’s trip to Buenos Aires was the second in a year, with the earlier trip made with Jenny Sanford’s approval since the intent of that visit was to break the adulterous couple up (that clearly didn’t work.)
Is it possible that Jenny Sanford kicked her husband out of the house in June 2009 not because he’d fall in love with—and gotten physical with—someone else back in 2008, but because the world had found out?
Could it be that Jenny Sanford’s need to focus on her own character—and step away from her partner-- was a response not to her husband’s loss of romantic love for her (which she had to have experienced MUCH earlier), but to how the world might judge her if she did otherwise--especially since a set of emails between her husband and his lover had been acquired and published in the local papers that made it clear how her husband was deeply smitten with Maria Belen Chapur.
Or, to put it another way, how much was the conflagatory infatuation between Sanford and his paramour a symptom of the death of the Sanford’s married romance, and how much was it the cause?
Reading the week’s worth of love letters from July 2008 made public and published by The State newspaper in June 2009, the themes that strike me are Chapur and Sanford’s surprise—and deep appreciation—at experiencing ]love (or
