Al and Tipper Gore's separation makes us fear for our parents, ourselves
By Ellen McCarthy
Please Al and Tipper, don't do this. For our sakes -- don't.
We can't handle it.
These kinds of things stopped bothering us long ago. Name almost any famous couple, and we're happy to place under/over bets on the date they'll divorce.
But the Gores were different. We believed in them. Even if we didn't agree with their politics, we admired their marriage -- the way, after all these years, they still genuinely seemed into each other.
They're like the couple down the block with the lush garden and the annual Labor Day cookout. The pair who are always power walking together and drinking wine on the front porch, who make you nudge your husband and say, "See? I want that."
Sure they had their ups and downs -- her depression, their son's life-threatening accident -- but after four kids and 40 years they were still in it. And still, we thought, held on to some enduring kernel of love.
So this doesn't just make us sad. It makes us scared.
It means that maybe marriage isn't something we can conquer. That you can have all the necessary ingredients -- romance, good morals, mutual respect and a healthy family -- and still see this precious thing, built over decades, crumble in the end.
It makes us frightened for our parents, our friends, ourselves. After all, couples together for more than 40 years almost never get divorced.
"They were seen as this perfect couple, that's why we're traumatized," says Terri Orbuch, a marriage therapist and sociology professor at the University of Michigan.
Perfect might be an overstatement, but certainly they struck us as a great pair -- his dorky peculiarities cut by her lively, blond spunk. The truth is we liked them more as a couple than we did individually. And we never doubted they were real. Forget the Great Convention Kiss of 2000 -- that was politicking and theatrics. Look at the way he cradles her hand in their wedding photo, how she beams at him across the lawn of U.S. Naval Observatory. You don't fake that.
Which means something worse: that affection evaporated, rather than solidified, across their 40 years.
Forty years! It's hard to conceive of the equation that could make them conclude that life on the other end of a split will be better than it was before. After sticking around that long, what could persuade a couple to forfeit all they had together? The end of incessant arguing and promise of peace? The prospect of another romance?
But who else will recall how adorably frustrated you got putting that model train set together on Christmas Eve? Or laugh about the time we drove out west and got miserably lost but it turned out okay because we stumbled upon that old-fashioned diner and had the best milkshakes of our lives.
A new partner won't remember. Neither will the empty spot on the other side of the bed.
We wanted to see the Gores -- our parents, our friends, the neighbors with the porch -- delight in their twilight years. Playing with their grandchildren, traveling together in a way they never could before, operating more slowly, but in union. We want to see them move into sweetness.
"This is supposed to be one of the easiest and happiest periods of marriage . . . the reward for a job well done," says Andrew Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins University sociology professor who studies families.
But the other fact is that we've never before faced empty nest periods that could easily extend for 20 or 30 years. "The institution of marriage wasn't designed for that. It was designed to help us raise kids and put food on the table," says Cherlin. "It may just be that it's a difficult task for married couples to keep a happy life going for decades."
The Gores knew as much. In their 2003 book, "Joined at the Heart," -- see how seriously they took this endeavor? They wrote a book about it! -- the Gores explored the way a prolonged life expectancy could affect American unions. "If couples are in unhappy marriages they are more likely to eventually divorce as they face so much of their lifetimes together after their child-rearing years are over," they wrote.
Today half of all divorces take place within the first seven years of marriage, Cherlin says, and no more than 1 percent occur after 40 years. But that might change as baby boomers start to reassess how they want to spend their golden years.
Washington divorce lawyer Sanford K. Ain sees it occasionally, a couple breaking up after more than half a lifetime together. It reminds him of that old joke where an elderly couple is asked why they waited so long to divorced. "We wanted to wait until the kids were dead," they answer.
"More often that not, when people get divorced after that length of time it's because they're just not content -- they're not happy," Ain says. "And they want to look for something else."
As news of the Gore's separation emerged, we jumped to speculate that that "something else" was really someone else, already waiting in the wings.
The truth is, we don't just think there's an affair involved. We hope there's one. That makes it easier and understandable -- unequivocally someone's fault. Then it can be detestable, not just sad.
"It's more threatening to us if we see a couple who we thought were happy just drift apart," Cherlin says. "If even well-behaved people get divorced after 40 years, then some of us will worry about what our own marriages will be like later in life."
But even if there was an infidelity, Ain says that is rarely the cause of a separation after this long. "Quite frankly even if it's a factor, it's inconceivable to me that it could be the reason for the breakup," he says. "Even if one of them has become involved with someone else, it's hard to believe they could have a bond with that other person that transcends the relationship that they have with one another."
Count Terri Orbuch, who recently completed a 20-year study of marriage for the National Institutes of Health, among the few who weren't surprised by the news. To really work, long-term relationships need "regular attention, regular affirmation on a daily basis," she says. And Al Gore may have been gone too much -- out saving the world -- to save his marriage. Or maybe it was Tipper who was inattentive?
Whatever the case, they did not make the decision to separate cavalierly. But the old adage that you never know what's really going on in someone else's relationship is no comfort here. We need to know -- so that we can point to whatever it was and say, "See, that won't happen to us."
It won't, will it?
