Al & Tipper Gore – Splitting After 40 Years of Marriage

After 40 years of marriage, Former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper,  a famous political couple, sent an email to their friends on Tuesday, announcing their separation.

The announcement has shocked and caught everyone off guard and many are asking two questions – “Why them” and “Why now.”

• “Why them?” – after all they are nice people and seemed such a close couple
• “Why now?” – they’ve  been together for 40 years and are in their 60’s

If you listen to relationship experts, they point to a host of reasons why a couple at such a late stage might find themselves in this position.

• Some argue that they simply grew apart.  As their marriage passed the 40 year mark, their paths, interests and expectations changed.  It’s not inconceivable that people’s desires, preferences and interests would have changed enough over 40 years and it’s not inccvable, therefore that they might decide they are better off splitting up
• Al and Tipper are the parents of four children and parenting can be so all-consuming that it’s virtually a permanent distraction from one’s own marriage. When the child-raising chapter is done, people face each other across the kitchen table and ask themselves, “Can this be the relationship that will be my primary source of enjoyment as we go forward?’”
• Compounding the normal stresses and demands of raising four children, the Gores went through a painful ordeal when their then six-year-old son, Albert, was nearly killed in a car accident.  Individuals deal very differently with trauma – for some couples it draws them closer together for others it’s the beginning of difficulties that will manifest itself later on in their marriage.
• Older people have expectations for their relationships now that previous generations may not have. Even a couple of decades ago, people didn’t have the same expectations of love and intimacy at a later age that people now have. Part of the reason is that back then,  there was the idea that by our sixties, life was pretty much over. But today, people who reach 65 are likely to have another 20 years ahead of them, so it makes the calculus of living in an unhappy marriage even harder to take.
• Statistically, marriages in the late ’60s and ’70s are marked by higher divorce rates than those of later years – partly because people still married very young. (Tipper Gore was 21 and Al Gore 22 when they wed.)
• Al and Tipper were part of a political marriage and that can be tough.  And once the common goals are gone – the glue to the marriage is gone.

At the end of the day, we will never really know the reasons – the Gore’s probably aren’t really sure themselves  how they ‘grew apart’ and most likely it is not one single reason but is a multitude of reasons that contributed to their split.

I think the moral of this story is that nobody really knows the inside of a marriage – and the number of years isn’t indicative of quality of relationship.

And whatever made the Gores drift apart, the silver lining in the story is that may be that at this stage in life, splits can often be much more amicable. Couples at this stage in life may just realise they just don’t have that intimate partnership anymore – or maybe they realise they never had it. But their parting can be a very respectful parting of ways. As people get older, their capacity for reflection grows.

And finally, their parting doesn’t mean that what they had for 40 years wasn’t good and genuine.  As one commentator said – how can you call 40 years of marriage a failure?