John McCain came back from Vietnam a celebrity in 1973. He was 37 years old and hadn't seen his wife in nearly six years. A former swimwear model in Philadelphia (a euphemism for pretty) , Carol McCain was McCain's age and during his imprisonment had had an ordeal of her own: she'd gotten into a gruesome auto accident on Christmas Eve 1969, for which she had undergone 23 operations. "She was now four inches (ten centimeters) shorter, on crutches, and substantially heavier than when he had last seen her." McCain became a Navy aide to the Senate and began a series of affairs, including one with Cindy Lou Hensley, a former cheerleader (i.e., pretty) who was a lot richer than him, and 18 years his junior. Still is now.
McCain later attributed his divorce to "selfishness and immaturity." His first wife ascribed it to McCain wanting to be 25 again, not 40. There's always a reason, huh.
You can draw the parallels to the Edwards case. He also has lashed himself with "immaturity." Though he has stuck with his wife a lot longer than McCain, would seem to have had fewer affairs, and his girlfriend wasn't as young or moneyladen as McCain's. This is something immature and mature men and women do. More guys do it than women, for whatever reason.
Says debauchette:
We’d question why it’s so common. We’d look to other attitudes,
attitudes we neither share nor understand. We’d allow for a more
nuanced discussion, perhaps find solutions or new ways to think about
intimacy and fidelity. If there’s anything I’ve learned as a
prostitute, it’s that our attitudes toward marriage are simplistic,
even naive, and that simplistic thinking is encouraged and exploited by
the gossip media. But then, I’m not convinced it’s the cheating that
matters to us so much as the power of judging and condemning strangers.
That’s what keeps the gossip rags going – they feed the public with a
steady stream of fallen heroes, the powerful at their weakest, the
beautiful at their ugliest, the famous at their most damaged.
