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Of course the beleaguered wife, Rosemarie Fritzl, didn't know a thing. She had an extreme case of spousal denial.

Her husband, Josef Fritzl, 73, confessed to Austrian police this week that he had kept their daughter, Elisabeth, now 42, in a bunker beneath the family home since 1984. He had fathered seven children with her. Rosemarie was reportedly unaware of her husband's incestuous activities. For 24 years, he kept his secret underground - in more ways than one.

Criminal psychologists point out that full-blown psychopathic behaviour, which is rare and probably involved in the Austrian case, describes someone who is skilled at deception and compartmentalization. He or she maintains dual realities: seemingly normal in one life, criminal and evil in another. This explains why it's not uncommon to hear stories about wives of serial killers, for example, who say they had no idea what their partners were doing.

"I was in shock," said Judith Mawson Ridgway, former wife of the supposedly mild-mannered truck painter Gary Ridgway, who pleaded guilty in 2003 to killing 48 Seattle-area women, more than any other serial killer in U.S. history. "He made me feel like a newlywed everyday," she told a local television station, smiling meekly, in an interview six years after the discovery.

Psychopaths aside, if ordinary couples are honest they'll agree that there's a more garden-variety version of spousal denial or marriage blinkers.

We all often choose not to see certain truths - in our children, in our friends and especially in our spouses. Wedding vows should include, "With this ring I suspend my disbelief in you."

Did Silda Spitzer never once suspect the behaviour of her husband, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer? He was making arrangements to have trysts with prostitutes for several years. Wouldn't she have known? Or, did she notice some odd behaviour and rationalize it away somehow?

Certainly, many ex-spouses will say, once their marriage is kaput and especially when some uncomfortable truth has been subsequently exposed, they intuited something was a bit off about their partner's conduct but didn't act on it at the time.

I know people who discovered, post-divorce, that their spouses were involved in dubious business activities, for example, or had affairs while they were married. Only when free of the marriage, and in retrospect, do they realize that if they had been thinking right at the time they would have questioned certain behaviours.

It's not just that love is blind; it's that once married, you become tied up in wanting - and needing, for a variety of reasons - to believe the best of your spouse.

"We can all become prisoners of hope, and it can become very convincing in spite of what might be laid out in front of us," says Stephen Madigan, a Vancouver marriage and couples counsellor.

Divorce finally lifts the veil.

I say that because I often joke that the ritual procession in the Western wedding ceremony should be altered in one significant way. Tradition dictates that the bride sails down the aisle on the arm of her father, with a veil covering her face. At the altar, once the vows have been exchanged and the couple have been declared married, the groom lifts the veil to kiss her. Then, the newlyweds parade in front of the congregation, who can clearly see their beaming faces.

It should be the reverse. The bride should wear the veil after she has become a wife. Once a couple are married, it becomes paramount for the participants to believe that everything is fine, really, just fine, thank you.

One reason may be the emotional investment and the public declaration that come with marriage. You are telling your community of friends and family that this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. You spent months planning the event. Perhaps your parents forked over big dough for your reception. Members of the congregation cried with joy. God was watching, too. Your mother sighed with relief. And the wedding dress was the same price as a new fridge.

If you start doubting the person you married - and paying attention to why your intuitive alarm bells are going off - it's a bit like admitting that the house you just bought with all your savings is riddled with dry rot and can't be fixed. You are supposed to have kicked the tires, checked the foundations. Wasn't that what all that time dating and maybe even living together was about?

Status is involved in keeping the blinkers on, too. No one wants to admit, "I am married to a controlling, difficult and mean-spirited man, who probably has affairs with prostitutes because he never wants sex with me." You want to say, "I am married to the governor of New York."

"There's a whole history of influence when it comes to the institution of marriage," observes Dr. Madigan. "We are continually filled up with the idea that to be married is a good thing, but that to question marriage is not a good thing."

He also points out that while there is plenty of cultural encouragement to marry, there is little support once you are in a marriage. "People are really on their own when it comes to figuring out the relational politics of being married to someone, and it's a taken-for-granted expectation that we should know what to do."

You're isolated inside the marriage. Hoping that things will improve is easier than trying to investigate signs of trouble.

When children come along, the need to make the marriage work grows, despite doubts that may have mounted. "Women, especially, need to believe the best of their spouses," says Caryn Miller, a Toronto psychotherapist who works with individuals and couples. "In many families, their livelihoods depend on men."

The inability to recognize trouble signs is often a matter of marital acclimatization. It could be that those nasty psychopaths gradually manipulate and deceive the people in their intimate orbit. Their partners get used to the dysfunctional environment gradually, one degree at a time, like a mouse in a pan of water that slowly reaches the boiling point.

In marriages with average people, this also happens at some level. Remember that song from My Fair Lady? "I've grown accustomed to her face ... her smiles, her frowns, her ups, her downs, are second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in."

Couples get used to each other. You learn to live with all the other's warts - good, bad, big, small. It's only when you're out in the fresh air of ex-hood that you see your former partner for who he or she truly is.