Jenny Sanford Shows Vogue She’s Down With God, Gabriel García Márquez And Forgiving Mark Sanford

Jenny Sanford, the estranged wife of disgraced South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, opened up to Vogue about the impact her husband’s affair with Argentine journalist Maria Belen Chapur has had on her. The resulting portrait is one of a religious, family-oriented woman who is smart, hurt and dedicated to moving on (as much as one can move on while discussing one’s husband’s affair in a magazine).

One of the first things one notes from the interview is that Sanford’s interviewer, Rebecca Johnson, seems genuinely flabbergasted that a conservative woman can keep Gabriel García Márquez on her bookshelf, have liberal friends, and is able to go an hour without bashing someone with a Bible. Johnson marvels at Sanford’s background on Wall Street, and of her summers spent on Long Island  doing perhaps a few “things I probably shouldn’t have done.”

What’s most amazing to us, however, is the poise Sanford is able to exude even while her husband continues to make a fool of himself acting like a lovelorn 14-year-old reading from the margins of a composition book. Sanford carefully and diplomatically attempts to let us know it’s so hard out there for successful white men with power not to be assholes:

“I think”—she chooses her words carefully—“my husband has got some issues that he needs to work on, about happiness and what happiness means. You wish it wouldn’t come to a crisis like this, but I think when a lot of men get to this midpoint in life, they start asking questions that they probably should have asked a long time ago.” A former investment banker and a stay-at-home, full-time mother, Sanford doesn’t share her husband’s angst. “Midlife aging is different for men than for women,” she says. “Mark is worried about what his next job is. He worries about making money, running for office again, his legacy. I know my legacy is my children. I don’t worry about that.”

We’re not entirely sure whether Sanford is implying that women consistently or innately worry about children over their careers or finances, but we understand what Sanford is getting at.

For the record, Sanford does not believe her husband is a bad person - merely a victim of his own hubris. In a refreshing twist from how scorned wives are usually portrayed in the media, Sanford admits to Googling pictures of Chapur out of curiously. For the record, Sanford thinks M.B.C. is pretty.

Sanford is also keeping the door open for a possible reconciliation with her husband - if, she says, he is willing to do the work required.

Making this potential make-up for difficult, however, is the fact that Jenny Sanford’s family is asking for their donation money back. Someone purportedly close to the family (whose quote, it should be noted, goes against what Mrs. Sanford told Vogue) says Sanford and her family are cutting ties with Mark Sanford entirely:

Jenny and her entire family are through with him. They neither want nor need this money, certainly, but there is symbolic value to requesting it back and to no longer being associated with the furtherance of his political career.

We suppose that, perhaps even though some middle-aged women may not care about money or something so base as revenge, their families very well might.

Notes on a Scandal [Vogue]