Mark Sanford's fiancee caught off guard by engagement ending

It turns out Rep. Mark Sanford's fiancée was as surprised as the rest of us when Sanford, a Republican from South Carolina, took to Facebook on Friday to announce the end of his engagement.

"I learned it from the press today," Maria Belen Chapur, Sanford's mistress-turned-fiancee, told the New York Times on Saturday.

Chapur had been in Paris with Sanford for the previous week, a trip she likened to a "honeymoon," but the relationship ultimately soured when the two couldn't agree on a wedding date. "We had a great time here," she told the Times from Paris. "I thought that he might tell me, 'O.K., let's put a date, end of 2015.' But that didn't happen. That's why I wrote to him, 'I had a spectacular week, you know I love you, but I don't want to continue in the category of mistress, and if we continue like this I continue in that category, and I can't bear it anymore. It has been really painful to me.'"

Chapur said Sanford asked her to postpone for another two years, to allow his son Blake to mature and wait for the divorce and custody battle with his ex-wife, Jenny Sanford, to play out. But she wasn't willing to delay any longer.

"I've already been five years waiting and two years since the engagement," she said.

Though she'd asked Sanford to make their breakup public, Chapur said, he did not notify her of his announcement before it went out.

In his Facebook post on Friday, Sanford blamed the "agony of divorce" and the custody battle with his ex-wife for putting stress on his relationship with Chapur.

"No relationship can stand forever this tension of being forced to pick between the one you love and your own son or daughter, and for this reason Belen and I have decided to call off the engagemet," he wrote. "Maybe there will be another chapter when waters calm with Jenny, but at this point the environment is not conducive to building anything given no one would want to be caught in the middle of what's now happening."

Sanford even lauded Chapur's patience, praising her as a "remarkably wonderful woman" who'd "silently borne" the "tribulations" of their courtship.

The post lit a media firestorm when it landed on Friday afternoon, but it seemed fitting that a coupling that began under such an intense public microscope would apparently end in the same manner.

Sanford and Chapur's relationship went public in 2009 when Sanford was the governor of South Carolina. After he was out of contact for several days in June, and the press began asking questions about his whereabouts, his staff settled on a whopper of a lie: the governor was hiking the Appalachian Trail, they said.

Sanford, then a married man, was actually in Argentina with Chapur. When his staff's lie began to unravel, he quickly flew back to South Carolina and convened a press conference to own up to his infidelity.

The governor had previously been considered a rising star and potential GOP presidential candidate, but instead he quietly finished his term a pariah. His political career seemed over, but in 2012, Sanford decided to throw himself back into the fray, launching and winning a bid for Congress in a special election.