Editor’s Note: A longtime journalist, Margo Howard went into the family business (her mother was the fabled Ann Landers) in the 1990s as Dear Prudence. Her broad experience and understanding of human nature provide answers for the troubled — and entertainment for everyone else. Click here to read her column on Yahoo!

There was a front-page story in last Saturday’s New York Times about Cindy McCain that had the senator’s campaign spitting bullets – and, of course, attacking the Times and "the liberal media." Their ire, I feel certain, was not that there was anything untrue in the piece, but that "America" had perhaps not had all this information laid out for them before. The story basically detailed the McCain’s de facto separate lives, revealed Cindy’s weird desire to emulate, if not be Princess Diana, and shone a spotlight on things John McCain would just as soon have consigned to the Distant Past bin: his and Cindy’s deep connection to the Keating Five, John’s dumping his loyal, well-liked, health-impaired starter wife, and Mrs. McCain’s possibly felonious theft of pain meds from a charity.

But none of that is what got my attention, perhaps because I already knew much of it. What did register with me, as a woman, was this quote: "As his poll numbers have slid recently, her devotion has seemed only to grow."

Bingo. I understood why that sentence made bells go off: I recognized the dynamic. Not only had I lived it, but so had a few women I knew well. (It is quite possible that some of you will read this with a knowing smile.) My hard-earned insight was this: when a man — whether husband or lover – is chilly and plays hard to get, emotionally, it elicits from the female partner a mad desire to please.  The woman will do anything to make him happy, grateful, and with luck, bring him closer. Sometimes these are men who run around; sometimes they are just narcissists who are emotionally unavailable.

I suspect what incensed the McCain campaign was that the Times story, for those who knew what they were reading, spelled it out that John McCain was not such a great husband and that Cindy, her heiress status not withstanding, was just another lonely, neglected wife. Politically, this message ain’t great … family values and all that. But for me, for the first time, I no longer had negative feelings about Cindy McCain. I simply felt sorry for her. I would bet anything that the possibility of her husband gaining the presidency would give Cindy the hope that they might, at last, be together, share something, and have more of a marriage. Unfortunately for her, I don’t think that will happen.