Natalie, Meet Jenny

The best scene in Up in the Air has nothing to do with either frequent flyers or the dismantling of the American Dream. It’s a soliloquy delivered by Natalie (played by Anna Kendrick), the ambitious, buttoned-up, cute-as-a-button Ivy grad who’s on her way to an assistant associate director position in the Overclass. I wouldn’t have made it past a second date with her (and never did with her doppelgangers). Having just been dumped by her boyfriend via text message, she holds forth on her type:

You know, white collar. College grad. Loves dogs. Likes funny movies. Six foot one. Brown hair. Kind eyes. Works in finance but is outdoorsy, you know, on the weekends. I always imagined he’d have a single syllable name like Matt or John or… Dave. In a pefect world, he drives a Four Runner and the only thing he loves more than me is his golden lab.

She got her wish. Natalie grew up to be Jenny Sanford, the soon-to-be-former First Lady of South Carolina whose husband, Governor Mark Sanford, informed her of his infidelity via press conference. In a rueful interview with The New York Times today to promote her memoir, Sanford lists the reasons that attracted her to Mark in the first place (such a solid, monosyllabic name, “Mark”):

When the couple met in the Hamptons in their mid-20s, he had a summer job in Manhattan at Goldman Sachs and was a graduate business student at the University of Virginia. He was a devout Christian, she recounted, whose father died when he was in college and who had struggled to save the family farm.

She was a vice president at Lazard Frères. A Georgetown graduate who regularly attended 5 p.m. Mass on Sundays, she also lived merrily on the Upper East Side, meeting girlfriends for drinks and date dissections.

“He was naïve with me,” said Mrs. Sanford, settling on the sofa in the mansion library, with family photos scattered about, an oil painting of her husband staring down from the mantel. “He didn’t have a lot of experience courting women, let’s just say.”

Back then, she found him a nice change from Wall Street wolves: wholesome, spiritual, outdoorsy. That was the narrative she clung to, when he refused to say “fidelity” in their wedding vows. “I thought it was refreshing and honest,” she said. “What kind of an idiot was I?”

Years later, she said, he would bemoan his lack of dating experience, wondering aloud what he had missed.