It was a while ago, the spring of 2009, that a writer named Jessica Pressler noticed a small

cultural shift going on in the waiting pages of the New York Times, the section that the paper

calls the VALS section.

The shift, it happened at a time when, I don't know, for whatever reason, there was a rush

of news stories about famous and powerful people

cheating on their partners. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford publicly confessed that his soulmate

was a woman in Argentina who was not his wife. Nevada Senator John Inson admitted paying $96,000

in cash to his former mistress and her husband.

Reality TV stars, John and Kate, had just split after reports that he'd had an affair.

And so it was in the middle of all that, Jessica Pressler noticed in the wedding pages of the New York Times that there were couples getting married who cheerfully told the newspaper as part of their meek-cute story that the way they got together was that one of them cheated on a spouse or a long-time partner.

I believe one of them says the headline on it is something like,

it took a while, but they finally got together.

And you're like, because he was having a three-year relationship with another person in the meantime.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jessica Pressler wrote up her discovery on the New York Magazine blog, Daily Intel.

She noted that there was a kind of code language in all these wedding articles.

They always say, like, their road to finding each other was a bumpy road,

or they had a difficult time, many ups and downs. They encountered some obstacles along the way,

and it's like, no, those are people. Those are, like, other, like, lives. They're not speed bumps.

Take, for instance, the married woman, who, according to a romantic write-up on the Valles page of the New York Times, flew to Paris to see another man and stayed with him in a hotel

in the Latin quarter for two weeks where they, quote, reveled in their own the boem before she flew back to the

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