It was a while ago, the spring of 2009, that a writer named Jessica Pressler noticed a small cultural shift
going on in the waiting pages of the New York Times, the section that the paper calls the Vals section.
The shift, it happened at a time when, I do n't know,
for whatever reason, there was a rush of news stories about famous and powerful people cheating on their partners.
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford publicly confessed that his soulmate was a woman in Argentina who was not his wife.
Nevada Senator John Ensign admitted paying $96,000 in cash to his former mistress and her husband.
Reality TV stars John and Kate had just split after reports that he'd had an affair.
And so it was in the middle of all that Jessica Pressler noticed in the wedding pages of the New York Times
that there were couples getting married who cheerfully told the newspaper as part of their meet-cute story that the way
they got together was that one of them cheated on a spouse or a longtime partner.
I believe one of them says, the headline on it is something like, It took a while, but they finally got together.
And you're like, because he was having a three-year relationship with another person in the meantime.
Jessica Pressler wrote up her discovery on the New York Magazine blog, Daily Intel.
She noted that there was a kind of code language in all these wedding articles.
They always say, like, their road to finding each other was a bumpy road,
or they had a difficult time, many ups and downs.
They encountered some obstacles along the way, and it's like, no, those are people.
Those are, like, other, like, lives.
They're not speed bumps.
Take, for instance, the married woman who, according to a romantic write-up on the Vows page of the New York Times,