In the annals of love’s sweet sacrifice, England has had the Duke of Windsor and now the U.S. has Mark Sanford, the Gaucho Guv of South Carolina. The similarities end there. Let the differences begin:

The Duke’s brief and concise abdication speech was written by a famous practitioner of English prose, Winston Churchill. The Gaucho Guv’s speech was neither brief nor concise nor written, but made up as he went along and drenched in the style of another famous practitioner of English prose, Barbara Cartland.

The wheels of the abdication turned swiftly. Immediately after broadcasting his speech, the ex-king bowed to his brother, who only 20 minutes before had bowed to him, and boarded a ship to take him into exile that very night. But now, weeks later, not only is the Gaucho Guv still with us, he hasn’t even finished his speech yet.

The biggest difference between these two lovesick men is one of attitude. The duke was privately neurotic but publicly impervious thanks to the sexual carte blanche bestowed upon royalty since time immemorial. He had grown up seeing his grandfather, Edward VII, get every woman he ever wanted for the asking. Sin and guilt simply did not exist, and adultery was not only permissible but required. It was understood and universally accepted that royalty seduced married women only. The king would never “compromise” a virgin lest the scandal prevent her from making a socially desirable marriage; i.e., she would have been ruined had she been ruined. The divine right of kings might have been constitutionally dead but psychologically it was very much alive. As Edward VII lay dying, Queen Alexandra performed the most generous act in the history of wives, sending a car for his last mistress, Mrs. Keppel, to bring her to his bedside so they could say goodbye. As for the common people, they derived a subconscious reassurance from the set-up because it satisfied their atavistic need to know that their chieftain was virile.

It’s a little different for a governor from below the Smith & Wesson line. There, sin and guilt are the linchpins of Christian conservatism and the common people are beset by an atavistic need to know that their chieftain is a Family Man. Normal lustiness and the inevitable yen for variety are in perpetual conflict with the reigning sociology. Adultery is on everyone’s mind because everyone reads the Bible, in whose pages it is also on everyone’s mind. As the boiling point approaches, these tormented folk ward off danger with a simultaneous blend of denial and acknowledgment that emerges in the Nashville Sound.

Adultery is a major theme of country music. The subject is approached more jauntily now than it used to be, but in its heyday Nashville churned out songs about guilt-racked and heartbroken sexual malcontents. Two etched on my mind that the Gaucho Guv must have grown up hearing are “I’m Throwing Rice (at the Girl That I Love)” and “One Has My Heart, the Other Has My Name.” Some years ago, someone surveyed Southern writers for suggested country-song titles and John Shelton Reed came up with “My Tears Spoiled My Aim.” My favorite entry was “I’ll Love Her Till the Ocean Wears Rubber Pants to Keep Its Bottom Dry.” At the end of the day, everything sounds like Barbara Cartland on grits.

Several commentators have taken the Gaucho Guv’s side and claimed to feel sorry for him. I’ll buy some of that provided we distinguish between compassion and pity. To me he is the provincial married man at an out-of-town convention in a big-city hotel, desperately hoping that this time — this trip, this escape — the sweeping romantic frenzy he has long craved will come his way. When he swears it’s not “just sex” he’s telling the truth. He wants to flee the whole panoply of Family Man identity and enter a world of plangent stares, whispered phone calls, coded notes, rendezvous, trysts, intrigue, danger, and loss — of what he’s not sure; what matters is being able to say, “This has never happened to me before.” That’s the trouble: Nothing ever has. A worldly man looks for the woman and then finds love, but the Family Man, like a new subscriber to eHarmony.com, has the love ready and waiting and then sets out to find the woman to go with it.

The Gaucho Guv does not deserve all the blame for his performance. He and his ilk are the creation of the feminist years when women nagged men to stop being so laconic and talk more. You got it, babe. Once they sounded like Gary Cooper in High Noon; now they are all vying for the title role in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Even more inadvertently, women created the New Family Man. The original Family Man left for the office before the kids were up, returned after they had gone to bed, brought work home, ate what was put in front of him without comment, and then fell asleep so he could get up and work some more. This wasn’t good enough for women, however, so they lifted the feminine mystique of hearth and home off their own shoulders, draped it over men’s, and nagged them to put their families first. You got it, babe. Nearly every TV ad shilled by a man claims that he uses the product, whatever it is, for his family.

Politicians of every stripe no longer speak of Americans, but of “Americans and their families.” If they forget, they go back and add “andtheirfamilies,” running it all together as if it were a second nationality. And of course, there’s the new criminal raison d’être: “I want to spend more time with my family.”

I have some atavistic needs of my own. One of them is to hear men sound like men again instead of eunuchoid servitors of the male feminine mystique. Think where we’d be if they had always talked like this:

“I have not yet begun to fight for my family.”

“Liberty and family, now and forever, one and inseparable.”

“My family, right or wrong.”