Eliot Spitzer has a different set of demons, but it was clear from Jonathan Darman’s terrific recent Newsweek cover story that he hasn’t exactly faced them, saying that he had talked to “people” when Darman asked him if he’d seen a therapist, and explaining in hilarious and presumably unintentionally graphic terms that there had been “some element of tension and release” that drove him to a 22-year-old call girl named Kristen.

In the magazine there was a photo of a beaming Silda Spitzer standing beside her husband with her arms around him, much like the image of John and Elizabeth Edwards on “60 Minutes” when they appeared to defend his decision to stay in the race when her cancer returned. This was long before the news of his infidelity surfaced, but even then a great many commentators wondered why he would “put her through it” and why she would be game.

I asked some of her friends the same question for the piece I was doing and quoted them explaining that for her to simply go home would be giving in to the cancer, and that besides, she and her husband had been committed to the dream of the presidency for a long, long time. And that’s another thing I told the girls: We regular people can’t imagine what it’s like to give yourself over to that kind of all-encompassing ambition or to align yourself with someone who has it. Usually the partner wants it just as badly – and either way, a huge investment has been made in the dream. Silda Spitzer might have looked shell-shocked when she donned her double strand of pearls and dutifully shared the podium with her husband after he was caught, but it was widely reported that she was among the very few people who advised him to fight for his job. And then, of course, there’s Hillary Clinton, who has made bargains few of us could ever understand, but they paid off – she’s been a U.S. senator, came close to being president and now she’s secretary of state.

“We make a deal with the devil when we enter public life,” says Jeff Gardere, a Manhattan-based clinical psychologist. “We know that whatever happens – good, bad or ugly – it will play out on a public stage.” Standing by one’s husband “is part of the job description,” he says. “These women are not being forced on stage at gunpoint. They know that it’s part of the paces of public life. It was part of the deal they made to be first lady of a city, or a state, or a nation.”

Interestingly, though, Gardere does not see the compliance with that bargain as necessarily demeaning. Rather, he says, it can be empowering – and for all the legions of female bloggers who found Spitzer’s support of her husband “nauseating,” there were a great many who found her a compelling, even admirable figure, and certainly Edwards is seen as one. “These women are showing the world that there is no shame in their game,” Gardere says. “They may be in shock, but they are also demonstrating a tremendous amount of underlying strength. While their husbands have clearly disgraced themselves, their families and their office, they are saying, ‘I’m going to show you who I am as a person, that my standards remain at the highest levels as a wife and as a partner.’” Indeed, when Elizabeth Edwards was asked how she would feel if Hunter’s child is in fact her husband’s, she said, in essence, “That has nothing to do with me or my life, that’s his problem.”