Mysteries of the Clinton marriage

Once upon a time, a boy from Arkansas spotted a girl from Illinois across a crowded classroom. And on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, on the night Hillary Rodham Clinton became their party’s official nominee for president, Bill Clinton did his best to make one of the most-scrutinized marriages in the history of American politics fit into the contours of a fairy tale.

Okay, a revisionist feminist fairy tale, where the princess eventually saves the prince from the dragon, or the peasant girl ultimately tells the arrogant aristocrat to shove it in favor of lighting the castle on fire and leading a revolution. But watching Bill Clinton argue to the American people that they, too, should love his wife, and trying to narrate his marriage as a wonky fable, was both vexing and sweet at the same time.

The harder the Clintons have worked to preserve their marriage, the less easily that marriage has fit into easy stories about what true love should look like. And whenever the Clintons put their marriage at the center of the political cases they make for each other, the relationship becomes more vulnerable to criticism and dissection at the moments when it’s asked to carry the greatest public weight.

That complexity is in part a testament to the highly unusual route the Clintons travel, and the unique place they occupy in American history. It’s also about our failure to distinguish between the courage it takes to tap a girl on the back and the effort it takes to stay with her, between persuading her to marry you and convincing her to stay after you’ve metaphorically burned down that cute little un-air-conditioned starter house.

I believe Bill Clinton loves his wife. I cannot comprehend that he has subjected her to the humiliations she suffered through the years.