Weiner said this period has been a respite for both of them. “Whatever Hillary does next, who knows how long it’s going to last, and whatever I do next. . . .” He trailed off. “We kind of have the feeling that we’re on this reprieve. It’s calm. Let’s enjoy it while we can.”

We headed down the hall to the office that he shares with his wife. He closed the door, and I asked if he was prepared to tell me how this all started. “The story of the scandal?” he said. The original behavior, I said. He paused for a long time and then started in.

“Part of the challenge of getting to the bottom of it for me,” he said, “is that I viewed it as so frivolous that it didn’t spark a lot of, like, ‘O.K., I started doing it on this day’ or ‘O.K., now I’m crossing a Rubicon.’ For a thoughtful person, it’s remarkable how little thought I really gave to it until it was too late. But I think a lot of it came down to: I was in a world and a profession that had me wanting people’s approval. By definition, when you are a politician, you want people to like you, you want people to respond to what you’re doing, you want to learn what they want to hear so you can say it to them. Twitter and Facebook allowed for me — not only could I go to a town-hall meeting or a senior center or in front of the TV camera, but now I could sit and hear what people were saying all around. Search your name on Google, begat read comments on your Facebook page, begat looking at what people are saying about you on Twitter, to then trying to engage them. ‘Oh, you should like me!’ ‘No, that’s wrong!’ or ‘Thank you very much!’ And it just started to blur into this desire to engage in it all the time. Someone stops me in the airport and says, ‘Wow, you’re amazing.’ Well, O.K., now, at 2 o’clock in the morning, I can come home from playing hockey and I can find someone saying, ‘Oh, that was great’ or ‘You’re an idiot.’ So somewhere in there it got to a place where I was trying to engage people in nothing about being a politician. Or sometimes it would start out about politics and then, ‘You’re a great guy.’ ‘Oh, thanks, you’re great, too.’ ‘I think you’re handsome.’ ‘Oh, that’s great.’ And there just wasn’t much of me who was smart enough, sensitive enough, in touch with my own things, understanding enough about the disrespect and how dishonorable it was to be doing that. It didn’t seem to occupy a real space in my feelings. I think it would be pretty surprising to a lot of people: What was he thinking?” He scrunched up his face and shoulders. “I wasn’t really thinking. What does this mean that I’m doing this? Is this risky behavior? Is this smart behavior? To me, it was just another way to feed this notion that I want to be liked and admired.”

I asked whether he ever worried that it was going to come out.

“Well, I would stop, or say I was going to stop, talking to someone. Or not be responsive because I’d gone on to other things or whatever. And someone would get upset. One of these people would say, ‘You’re not paying enough attention to me’ or ‘What’s going on with our relationship?’ And, I would then maybe play out, you know, if they told someone else that I was not paying attention to them anymore. . . . But I would also think, Well, they’re my friends. We got into this conversation with one another because they cared, they were my fans, they would never do anything.” He took a deep breath and sank into his chair and stared at the table. “It wasn’t until after the train had run me over that I really understood that playing on those tracks was going to be problematic. I just had this disconnect.” Here, he began to seem agitated — frustrated by his inability to adequately explain his behavior. “Is it that I had this exaggerated notion of ‘No one will believe it?’ Or, since I didn’t think I was doing anything that was all that serious in my mind, that the world wouldn’t see it as being all that serious?” Finally, he said: “I knew when I did it, almost from the moment I did it, there was no good way for it to end. When I sent that fateful tweet.”

I startled myself that day when, after two hours of listening while he unburdened himself, I heard these words come out of my mouth: “Maybe we should stop there for now.” Never has an interview felt so much like a therapy session. Perhaps this was because Weiner started seeing a therapist almost immediately after the scandal broke.

“Just because I had to do something to be able to deal with it,” he said. “But also, I went from not really thinking through very much to having everything just blow up in such a monumental way, that you’d have to be really blind to not realize there must be some things that I need to resolve here and understand a little better. Therapy wasn’t something that came naturally to me. I am this middle-class guy from Brooklyn, the men in our family don’t hug each other, we don’t talk about our feelings. It wasn’t a comfortable place to be. And now I start sentences with, ‘My therapist says. . . .’ ”

What does your therapist say? I asked the next time we met.

“It’s none of the easy stuff. She didn’t tell me: ‘You have a sex addiction! You were abused as a child!’ None of that stuff, which in a lot of ways, I’d kind of prefer.” He laughed. “It’s an easy explanation that people intuitively get.” He talked a bit about how he didn’t like being alone, had a hard time being “still,” didn’t like “being in empty spaces.” And then he said: “It’s clear it wasn’t because I didn’t love Huma. It wasn’t because there’s anything about my relationship with Huma that was missing that I was looking for elsewhere. Even that would be pat, kind of understandable on some level.” Then he went back to the idea that Twitter and its ilk provided such easy access to the feedback loop. “You know, like spin the wheel! Find someone to say something to you! And if it wasn’t 2011 and it didn’t exist, it’s not like I would have gone out cruising bars or something like that. It was just something that technology made possible and it became possible for me to do stupid things. I mean, the thing I did, and the damage that I did, not only hadn’t it been done before, but it wasn’t possible to do it before.”