While the "We left our spouses for each other" New York Times "Vows" column was certainly a doozy, this new one, about the June 4th wedding of Andrea Catsimatidis and Christopher Cox, might be even worse.

Some background on this union of two gnarled branches of American royalty: Cox, the grandson of Richard M. Nixon and the son of the chairman of the New York Republican State Committee, met Catsimatidis, the daughter of Gristedes supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis, while he was campaigning for John McCain at her high school.

Yes, the then 29-year-old Cox met Catsimatidis at her tony Upper East Side private school back in 2008, when she was 17, and they were instantly smitten. A courtship ensued and they became engaged — he proposed to her at her high school — last year, much to the horror of Long Island society. So flash forward a year to a lavish, 700-person Waldorf Astoria wedding and, of course, the inevitable Times profile. And it's just full of gems:

"She was the only person I remembered meeting that day," he said. Ms. Catsimatidis, who at the time was five days shy of her 18th birthday, found herself taken by Mr. Cox's political convictions, as well as his boyish looks.

"All the girls were cutting me in line," remembered Ms. Catsimatidis, now 21. "They all wanted to meet the cute McCain guy."

That may mark the only time that "cute" and "McCain guy" have ever appeared in the same sentence. "Skin-molting lizard people are cute" just doesn't get said a lot.

As a child, Christopher Cox would go to sleep listening to tapes of President Nixon reading books. A family story has it that when Christopher was 3 or 4, he was sitting at the dinner table when someone asked for the salt. "I said, ‘Be careful with the salt, it's important for world peace,' " Mr. Cox said. "I had no idea that it was the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks."

Wait, Richard Nixon recorded himself reading books about the SALT treaty? And a child was allowed to listen to that? Would that be considered abuse these days?

Her father, she added, was quite strict ("one of those overprotective Greek fathers," she says) and would insist, among other things, that she come straight home after school.

"If I was not in the house at 3:20," she said, "he would threaten to call Ray Kelly," the New York police commissioner.

Princesses must be kept safely in the castle, this is true.

For their second date, Mr. Cox took Ms. Catsimatidis to the presidential debate at Hofstra University on Long Island. By then, she said, she had come to recognize how well their backgrounds, values and beliefs meshed. "It made it so much easier," she said. "If politics are so important in both of our lives, we have to agree."

"Soo, where are we going on our date??" "Hofstra." "I... Uh. It's over."

On June 4, they were married at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Trinity on the East Side, before a church packed with family members and political powerhouses (Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Kelly sat on the bride's side, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Mr. Giuliani on the bridegroom's) and a tittering clutch of Ms. Catsimatidis's high school friends. "Can we talk about the fact that this is actually happening?" one of the young women, round-eyed, said to a friend.

Yes, let's talk about it! Let's talk a lot about how this is actually happening.

The article then ends with a whimsical description of young Ms. Catsimatidis gushing about her perfect day while behind her George Pataki boogies to an AC/DC song. While outside, the peasants starved.

If you want to know more about this couple, the New York Post ran a darling little profile a couple weeks ago that's most notable for featuring a hilarious photo in which a butler, a fully tuxedoed butler, can be seen in the background. (Update: The butler is made of wax! So it's a fake "joke" butler? Either way it's bad, really.)

So all things considered (Nixon, McCain, high school, Gristedes): Worst ever? Maybe?

[NYT, Photos via Getty Images]