So Gov. Sanford admits to having an affair. Gov. Sanford, I note, was born in 1960, which would make him 50 next year.

I bring up his age because recently we’ve seen the usual drivel from some troglodytes objecting to the nomination of a woman to the Supreme Court because her judgment might be impaired by menstruation or menopause. When are we going to start worrying about the instability of middle-aged men?

I realize that anecdotes are not data. However, I have never personally met a woman of menopausal age — and I’m past that point myself — who blew off her life because of hot flashes. But I’ve known, and have known of, a number of men aged 45-60 whose lives crashed and burned because of sex.

In most cases they didn't just throw away their marriages; they also lost jobs and wrecked careers. Relationships with children, friends and other family members were irreparably strained or severed.  Yes, older women can behave just as foolishly, but it seems to be much less common. We women tend to go through our self-destruct phase when we’re much younger.

I remember one of my former college professors who left a wife, two children, and a tenured faculty position to run off with a student, who then dumped him a few months later. Another academic of my acquaintance burned a plum position at a prestigious university and years of hard-won professional contacts when he left his wife for a student. A man I used to call a good friend lost every one of his friends after he abruptly left his wife (also a good friend) for a younger woman. Yes, the younger women were involved in the affairs, too, but they had nothing to lose.

Think about all the well-known politicians who either wrecked their careers or compromised their offices because they took chances with sex. We snicker at "family value" conservatives who get caught, but you know this happens all across the political spectrum.

Even if you think another person's sex life is no one else's business, I say that risk-taking behavior in someone with big responsibilities ought to be a concern. Think of what was squandered recently by, for example, John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer. They didn't just betray their families; they betrayed all of the people who worked in their campaigns and who voted for them.

What’s often remarkable to me is how reckless some prominent men's  behavior can be when so much is at stake in their lives, their ambitions, their work. In some cases they aren't just taking chances with their own lives; they are taking chances with their countries. Yet they can’t seem to help themselves.

I realize that most men — I don’t think — go down this path. But it happens often enough that I wonder why we don’t make an issue of the potential instability of middle-aged men.

 Update: I see a lot of men taking offense where I didn't intend it, and I'd like to elaborate a bit more. 

I don't think most middle-age men are unstable (the title was tongue-in-cheek), nor do I think men who have affairs are always "bad." As I said in one of the comments, I think sometimes their emotions catch them off guard.

Love -- eros-- has a way of sneaking up on us and smacking us on the head when we're sleepingwalking through our emotional lives. This has happened to me, too. It's one way we send messages to ourselves to  stop going through the motions and wake up. Having read Gov. Sanford's emails to his mistress I suspect that's what happened to him, and I can commiserate.

However, he was still a governor, and it says something that he didn't have more self-control than to run off to South America for a week.

I also assume that women have affairs about as often as men do, but women appear to be less likely to crash their lives because of it. Whether that's because we're more cautious or because we tend to be more in touch with our emotions and less likely to be caught off guard by them I cannot say.

But I say again, it's not the sex, but the recklessness, that's a concern.