It was a weird day for matrimony.  First, last night The Naughty Bride caught wind of this obligatory NYT piece about Elizabeth Edwards' PR tour for her book about the much-discussed affair with Rielle Hunter that killed her husband John's candidacy.  In it, Edwards refers to the resulting wee fils d'amour as "it," and says whether or not she and John still love each other is "a complicated question."

Then today the NYT's Maureen Dowd chimed in as the voice of the patriarchy, tsking that Elizabeth "doesn't seem to know much about men," after comparing the relative beauty of her better with that of the candidate's paramour and cattily wondering aloud "what [she] hopes to gain from this book."  

The Naughty Bride hates to be the one to point this out, but that's a bit rich coming from a writer whose column is no stranger to salacious detail in the service of her celebrity reputation.  (Ahem, no one look up in the corner at The Naughty Bride's pictures, or leaf through the blog for naughty euphemism, m'kay?)  Edwards and Dowd should be sisters on this.  But not so.

Why?  Ask Gay Talese.  According to a New York Magazine piece, he's writing a book about his marriage to publisher Nan Talese.  And how does that matter?  Gay Talese wrote Thy Neighbor's Wife in 1980 after exhaustive -- or perhaps exhausting --  research on the Sexual Revolution, and Nan his wife is one of the biggest deals in publishing.  That their relationship has lasted fifty years (50!) is supposed to be a miracle.  

As Elizabeth Edwards will tell you, it's not.  The "Resilience" in her title isn't accidental.  Surviving the drama that her twenty-eight year marriage (or Nan's fifty years) will bring is just simple hard work.  You've got to take your ego out and iron it as thin as possible every day.  And sometimes you slip, calling your husband's child "it."  (The Naughty Bride hopes this is temporary, btw.)  And you take your marriage "month by month," as Elizabeth is taking hers.  Or if you're like Nan, you say to your husband, "You are comfortable with specifics," he writes non-fiction, "And I am comfortable in the fog" in that she publishes fiction.    

How much better if these wives had torn a page out of Rielle Hunter's book (John Edwards' Other Woman) or Kirsten Garret's (Talese's) and seduced a married man -- their husbands. If only instead of "doing her Betty White number" and pretending nothing happened while Gay gallavanted, Nan had awaited him as Rielle awaited John Edwards in order to stalk up to him and say "You are hot," and [she] wanted to make videos with him.  If only Elizabeth Edwards had... well, gone out and done crazy research on orgies, or met her husband unexpectedly in Rome?  Well, okay, as the Wife Of a Candidate, she couldn't.  But something. And that's why she wrote this book, Maureen Dowd.  Because it's one way she can break out of the mold.  For a political wife, telling the tale of your upper lip's stiffness is mega-hula transgressive!  

Who knows?  Maybe they did do these things, and Elizabeth Edward still needs to tell her tale.  Or maybe Maureen Dowd's clucking is right, and it's better to deny, deny, deny, live in a Nannish fog because at the end of it you're still sitting beside the man who knows most of your life.  Because like Gay Talese, as Nan has now famously said of her husband, when it comes to marriage none of us really knows anything, so writing a book to discover more?   "It's probably all right."