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“I think that if you loved somebody, you always love them,” explains Jenny Sanford, the estranged wife of Mark Sanford, the Governor of South Carolina, who was embroiled in a sex scandal last June.

“I have come to the stage where there will always be a part of me that loves Mark Sanford,” the 47-year-old mother of four boys says without hesitation.

In her new book, Staying True, she writes about their 20-year marriage, their courtship, their years as a political poster family, and the stunning discovery that he was seeing his lover in Argentina when everyone thought he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. (She also reveals that after the cringe-worthy press conference in which he rambled about cheating on his wife, he phoned her and asked, “How’d I do?” A former investment banker, she had been his campaign manager during his first Congressional run, partly because, as she notes, she was “free.” He’s cheap as well as a cheater, it seems.) Still, there’s a palpable sense in the book that she continues to care about him. In fact, contrary to media reports that have held her up as a more self-valuing political wife than Elizabeth Edwards, Silda Spitzer or Hillary Clinton, all of whom stood by their cheating husbands, she was willing to forgive him and would have continued to support him as a wife if he’d been willing to give up his lover.

After she discovered his affair with Maria Belen Chapur, a 41-year-old divorcee, by coming across a letter he wrote to her, she even drew up a contract stipulating that if he agreed not to see his lover, she would not tell anyone about the affair. (He refused to sign it.) Partly, the decision was “out of respect for him and his position,” she writes, but she confesses on the phone from New York that it was also because divorce was “a difficult choice for me and not one I took lightly.”

It should also be pointed out that for all the discussion about how she didn’t pull a Silda, standing sheepishly by the side of her remorseful politician-husband as he confessed sexual infidelity, she had never been asked to by her husband. “No, he didn’t,” Mrs. Sanford admits.

And if he had, would she have? “I would have stood by the marriage, if he had actually showed that true and humble spirit of repentance,” she says. “There could have been a scenario where we could have gotten the marriage back on track and yet someone would have discovered his infidelity and forced him to address it at a press conference, and I would have still been, in a manner of speaking, standing by my man, by being married to him. But I don’t know if I ever still would have stood up at a press conference with him on that issue. Who knows?”

Writing a book about her marriage has dimmed her light as a feminist hero in the eyes of some onlookers. Mrs. Sanford is “the very victim I had imagined her not to be,” wrote Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post, noting that Staying True is replete with instances of “Jenny-as-doormat.”

But marriage is a complicated dance of compromise and forbearance that few, if any, on the outside can fully understand. Readers of Mrs. Sanford’s book may scoff at her husband’s frugality – he once gave her a diamond necklace and then insisted she return it because he didn’t think it was worth it – but she is quick to defend the nature of their mutual respect and love as a once happily married couple. “Mark is a quirky guy,” she tells me. “But once I came to understand his quirks, I wasn’t offended by them.”

In many ways, their marriage was the kind that Lori Gottlieb, author of the recent book, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, encourages women to pursue. “Many marriages are not completely fulfilling,” Mrs. Sanford admits. “They aren’t exactly what you expected or hoped they would be. But they can be solid and steady nonetheless.”

Such is the nature of any marriage's mysterious intertwining of hearts that it confounds many. Once its private nature has been exposed, they don't know how it could have endured. And an expression of love for an ex after separation, even after betrayal, seems odd.

Despite her continuing love for him, “I can’t be married to him,” Mrs. Sanford explains. But her feelings don’t “mean I can’t love somebody else fully and be loved by someone else.” She respects her soon-to-be-ex. “I continue to this day to see good in him.”

Was she glad that he survived possible impeachment? She hesitates slightly before answering: “I’m happy for the stability it brings for him and our children.”

Is he still with Ms. Chapur? “I have no idea. I don’t really want to know.”

Does she still have a good relationship with her soon-to-be-ex? “He’s taking care of the kids while I’m gone [on book tour] so we communicate daily.”

He was supportive of her writing the book, she says, but she doesn’t think he has been paying attention to her recent media interviews.

Well, don’t bother looking for a Valentine’s card that expresses that kind of multi-chambered, nuanced love. In the popular culture, we’re enthralled with a simplified concept of love – one that hits you like a lightning bolt, transforms your life or, on the flip side, ruins you. There are Ex Valentine cards out there, naturally, but they’re of the poison variety, ones that express how limp and unsatisfying his roses always were anyway, or include an unflattering photograph to an ex-soulmate along with the heartfelt wish that she make peace with her cellulite.

There’s nothing that captures the counterintuitive message that while you still love the guy, and want the best for him, you want a divorce.

Sarah Hampson’s book on midlife post-divorce, Happily Ever After Marriage: There’s Nothing Like Divorce to Clear the Mind, will be published by Knopf in April 2010.