Jenny Sanford: Staying True to a Man Who Never Existed?

In the midst of digging out from this epic snow, the weekend gave me repeated exposure to Jenny Sanford's book, "Staying True." After listening to her interview on NPR Monday morning and watching her two-part interview on "Good Morning America," I think the title is apt, although maybe not in the way Ms. Sanford intended.

I feel like I'm watching Jenny Sanford perform emotional and mental jujitsu as she tries to reconcile the man she thought she married with the politician who held that incredibly self-indulgent news conference last year. The man who publicly declared his love for his "soul mate" mistress and then called his betrayed wife to ask her critique of his performance.

From the excerpts I've read, the Mark Sanford of the infamous news conference was revealing himself to her long before he entered politics, and even before they married. Jenny Sanford provides numerous examples of her husband's thoughtless, selfish behavior. To wit: Her first visit to his family in South Carolina, where he left her to drive alone on a dangerous road in a stick-shift car she did not know how to operate. And much more tellingly, his insistence at removing the word "faithful" from their wedding vows.

In these and other instances in the book, Jenny Sanford finds a way to rationalize her husband's behavior, making each act sync with the man she believed herself to be married to, and stifling her own disappointments. Yet, instinctively, she must recognize the shock value of these transgressions, or else she would not have included them in the book.

In her interviews, Ms. Sanford made repeated references to the pressures of political life and how those pressures took Mark away from his core values, the man he "really is." I wonder if Jenny Sanford yet realizes the man Mark Sanford "really is." With four boys to raise, children who already are collateral damage in the public maelstrom of their father's behavior, maybe Jenny Sanford's position is understandable. But I hope her own understanding of her husband and of herself goes much deeper.

Lynne Adrine, a former senior producer with ABC News, currently works with the graduate broadcast journalism program at the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University in New York.