Is There a Mistress Limit? What Makes Scorned Celebrity Wives Throw In the Towel

Exactly how much will the modern celebrity wife put up with?

Not as much as she used to.

That may be a reasonable conclusion based on Jenny Sanford's decision to call it quits to her marriage to South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and the news that Elin Nordegren Woods is taking the kids and escaping to a remote Swedish location, leaving Tiger to deal with his own PR nightmare. But is it really true that we're seeing "the year of women fighting back?" If so, how do we explain the celebrity wives who have stuck it out (See Elizabeth Edwards, Silda Spitzer, and the long-suffering Hilary Clinton) even in the face of the most brutal public disclosures of extramarital cheating?

We can all agree that it wasn't that long ago that the "good" celebrity wife was expected to stand by her man no matter what─or as former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey told his wife, Dina, just before his 2004 press conference announcing he had had an extramarital affair with a man: "You have to pull yourself together. You have to be Jackie Kennedy today." She got through the press conference, but then divorced him and wrote a tell-all book. Not exactly what Jackie would do. So is it possible to sketch out the new consensus of how much is just too much?

"Obviously, there's no right answer about when to stay and when to go," says Stephanie Coontz, a family historian at Oregon's Evergreen State College and director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. "You don't have to be a doormat to forgive and work on a marriage. Good people can do bad things. People can give in to temptation and end up working their way through the infidelity. The dividing line, I think, is whether you've damaged the core of your relationship."  Such as:

• One affair may be forgivable, but having his torrid love e-mails to another woman go viral, ups the ante. It's "hard to forgive and not hold grudges when your husband announces that he's madly in love with someone else, and he doesn't tell you, he tells the public first," said Coontz.
• One affair may be forgivable, but having multiple affairs for years with every floozy you meet in a cocktail bar, particularly when your wife is pregnant, is definitely over the line. "Bringing other women into your own house, and having sex with them in every room, is not an indiscretion or giving in to temptation," said Coontz. "That's a blatant slap in the face. Would any woman put up with that?"
• One affair may be forgivable, but when it's with another man─and you don't find out that your husband considers himself to be gay until you read it in a draft of a speech he's about to give, that's is pretty hard to come back from.
  

The fact that the Internet makes these private indiscretions so public so fast also ups the ante. "Things have gotten much rougher in terms of public humiliation," Coontz said. "It should all be boring by now, but instead, we find it endlessly fascinating."