Women Who Walk: Jenny Sanford, Maria Shriver Leave Cheating Govs

May 17,2011— -- While many wives of unfaithful high-powered men grin and bear the infidelities, California's former First Lady Maria Shriver followed another highly admired governor's wife who moved out after painful public revelations of her husband's philandering: Jenny Sanford divorced former Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., after he publicly proclaimed he'd found his soulmate in an Argentine woman with whom he'd been carrying on an affair.

Shriver, a former NBC News journalist, left former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-Calif., , her husband of 25 years, and father of their four children, after he told her that he had fathered a love child more than a decade ago with a 20-year member of their household staff, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday. The couple announced May 9 that they had separated. Since leaving Sacramento, The Governator has announced plans to resume his acting career and his website depicts him with a chessboard under the words: "Stay tuned for my next move."

In deciding to separate, Shriver likely felt that the child Schwarzenegger fathered outside their marriage was a constant reminder of his betrayal, said Kate Wachs, a psychologist in private practice in Schaumburg, Ill., and author of the 2002 book, "Relationships for Dummies." "That's a big problem with trying to forgive someone in the present…the girl still exists, you can't take it away."

"That child probably played with their children," said Jodi Conway, a certified sex addiction therapist in Dumont, N.J. "When women find out that their husbands have betrayed them in this way, they are devastated, and the trauma they experience from that is the equivalent of rape trauma."

On top of that, Shriver likely felt another kind of violation in knowing her husband had sex with a woman entrusted with caring for their home, the santum sanctorum of family life. "She's in your house, she's dealing with intimacies. That's a much bigger betrayal," Wachs said.

"For her, enough was enough," Conway said. "She'd had enough heartache in her life," given the recent deaths of her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, her father Sargent Shriver and her uncle Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. "She's always been an example for women, and I think people do look up to her, and as a mentor for women, you've got to live by example."

"Very sad for Maria Shriver, but she did the right thing for herself to leave him. And I bet she will survive and thrive in the future," Debbie Then, a social psychologist in Los Angeles and San Francisco and author of the 1999 book, "Women Who Stay with Men Who Stray," said. She predicted that Shriver would be "an inspiration to other women," much like South Carolina's former first lady.

"I think collectively a lot of people in this country and a lot of women in this country really like Jenny Sanford for saying, 'I'm sticking up for myself; I'm not going to put up with this,'" Then said. "Sometimes a woman must walk in order to save herself."

Jenny Sanford learned of her husband's affair in January 2009 and asked him to end it. In June of that year, the governor held a news conference during which he tearfully confessed that he'd spent a week in Argentina with his lover, rather than hiking the Appalachian Trial as he'd told his staff. Unlike many political wives who have stood by their husbands as cameras record their apologies, Jenny Sanford was nowhere near the state Capitol in Columbia that day. Instead, she issued a public statement in which she said she tried to "seek reconciliation through forgiveness, and then to work diligently to repair our marriage," and had asked her husband to leave when "we reached a point where I felt it was important to look my sons in the eyes and maintain my dignity, self-respect, and my basic sense of right and wrong."

In August 2009, she and the couple's four sons moved out of the South Carolina Governor's Mansion and into the family's Charleston-area beach house; she filed for divorce in December 2009.

"I don't know that she could have done anything else," said Wachs. "She asked him to quit (the affair); she shouldn't have to do that. He should be the one saying 'I'm so sorry, I'm never going to see her again.' Instead, she really made it easy for him to apologize and change his stripes, and he turned it down."

Sanford won kudos from women who admired her strength in leaving. Many bought her book, "Staying True," also released in February 2010, in which she laid out some early red flags that might have suggested her husband wasn't the best marriage material. Among the revelations: her husband had modified their marriage vows to remove the promise of fidelity.