Silda Wall Spitzer

It's late, and I should be in bed, but I wanted to get this written while it's still just a teeny, tiny bit relevant.

During the height of the Spitzer scandal, a friend and I were talking, and she noted that I'm a little obsessed with Silda. She was wrong -- I'm a lot obsessed with Silda (but not in a crazy, dangerous way; more in a "I seriously do NOT understand what kind of idiot cheats on a woman like that" way).

My mom would be really happy if I were Silda. By all public accounts, she's gracious and funny and warm and ladylike. I think she's stunning. She went to Harvard Law, married someone who on paper seems like the kind of man straight women want to marry, had a ridiculously successful career in the law, and then started a charity because she was bothered by how lavish the children's birthday parties were in her social circle. Silda did everything "right," and her husband still f*ed whores.

I think of my friends' husbands, and I know that they would never do that. But I'll bet Silda never thought Eliot would do that either. I don't know many women who would marry a man knowing that he was likely to engage prostitutes, but most of the women I know are really smart. But Silda also strikes me as really smart.

So I'm left to think that she either knew and took her chances, or she had no idea what he was like after being married to him for decades. Both of those options SUCK.

You combine that with the whole mother thing, and what's a smart, ambitious, hard-working 35-year-old single woman supposed to do? Spitzer and the work mothers make being a career spinster seem really attractive.

Also, tangentially, I think she's a fool for not leaving him. If it were just the two of them, Eliot and Silda, I would understand that their lives have been entwined and enmeshed with each for over 20 years, and there's a lot there that we don't now. But she has three daughters, and I think she owes it to them to show them that it's not ok to stay with a man who cheats on you with whores. I think she's doing her girls a great disservice at this point. I don't think she has to disparage their father in front of them, but I think she definitely has to set the example for them, regardless of how much she loves him or her own heart is broken.