Mark and Jenny Sanford won't stop talking. For weeks now, I've been wishing they would hush about his Argentine affair, her exit from the governor's mansion, their wary distance as they decide whether to reconcile.

But now I think the S.C. governor and his wife are teaching the rest of us a lesson about marriage.

It's a simple lesson: Always marry for love.

I don't think the Sanfords did.

Jenny Sanford, who has begged the media for privacy, gave an interview to Vogue magazine that was published this week. The photo is a statement in itself. She's smiling, barelegged, wearing one of those cover-ups that women toss over a swimsuit on the way to the beach. This is what you gave up, buddy.

Her words are even more revealing.

She talked about meeting Mark Sanford more than 20 years ago, when he showed up to give her and one of her friends a ride to a party. She wasn't impressed. The curious thing is, they weren't exactly consumed by the flames of passion even after they got married: ``We weren't madly in love, but we were compatible and good friends,'' she said.

It sounds like she was talking about a really nice used car.

It also sounds like the way her husband talked about her after he revealed his affair. The best he could come up with is that he hoped to ``fall back in love.'' This was at the same time he said about his South American lover: ``This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.''

He had all the right words in him. He just didn't have them for his wife.

Even if you're young and moonstruck, you soon figure out that marriage is about a lot more than love. They tell you right there at the beginning in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer, all that stuff that's hard to think about when you're in full swoon.

Every married couple has to deal with the boring details of couplehood, and your spouse's annoying habits, and the inevitable bitter arguments that push you to the edge of saying things you could never take back.

But in the worst moments, what holds a couple together? It's not compatibility, or even friendship. It has to come from still being madly in love.

People get married for lots of wrong reasons-- their families push them together, there's a baby on the way, they get to a certain age and figure it's now or never. Some of those marriages even work, along the lines of a corporate merger.

The more the Sanfords talk, the more it sounds like they have one of those marriages. It's a high-functioning, high-achieving union of two intelligent people who grew up in wealthy families. But you know how some people give up on love and decide to just settle? I wonder if, in this marriage, both Sanfords settled.

In the end, they might stay together-- they have four children, and they know what divorce can do to kids.

But the more we know about the Sanfords, the more Mark Sanford's painfully goofy words about his lover start to make sense.

It's not just that he's really in love.

Maybe he's in love for the first time.

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