Marriage is Harder Than We Thought

Yesterday the various websites that cover such things breathlessly announced that Al and Tipper Gore have separated after forty years of marriage.

They met in high school and married young. Despite wealth and education and privilege, despite surviving depression and their child's near-fatal accident, they couldn't make it. They said as the years passed they drifted apart. The former Vice President traveled the world to raise awareness about global warming, when all the time things were cooling inexorably at home.

It reminds us all what a challenge it is to keep the warmth alive. We have to be mindful and make those small gestures that inspire hope in the hearts of our partners. In the end sex positions and six-pack abs aren't remotely important: the essential things are kindness and consideration, being there, being present, and touching one another with sacred tenderness and steady devotion. Remember today what a miracle your spouse is. Remember how amazed and grateful you were when she found you.

There's a beautiful, tender song by Alan Jackson that captures better than I ever could the longing and regret and hope infused in a relationship that has encountered hard times:

i wish i could back up and start all over
cause now i'd know better the best way to love her
the words i would tell her the time i would give her
i wish i could back up and start all over

time takes you places you never knew you'd be goin'
it softens the edges of memories you're towin'
it changes the reasons
you wanted to hold her
i wish i could back up and start all over

i wish icould back up and start all over
i'd make the first time feel like forever
not to be younger may be just to be smarter
i wish i could back up and start all over
time takes you places you never knew you'd be goin'
it softens the edges of memories you're towin'
it changes the reasons
you wanted to hold her
i wish i could back up and start all over
i wish i could back up and start all over
days i would take back nights i'd wanna make longer
moments i'd never just throw over my shoulder
i wish i could back up and start all over

but it's never too late to wanna do better
love's never easy,changes just like the weather
some dayd it's raining some are sunny and blue
there's never perfect but there's faithful and true
time takes you places you never knew you'd be goin'
it softens the edges of memories you're towin'
it changes the reasons
you wanted to hold her
i wish i could back up and start all over
i wish i could back up and start all over

I feel sad for the Gores, having to live out a private agony in such a public way, having to withstand the sordid speculation and the hounding questions. It is hard enough to sort through the feelings and reasons behind such an awful, difficult decison without twenty microphones in your face and fifty cameras stealing the sorrow in your eyes. Left alone they might still work it out, remember the reason that brought them together, the faith and strength that brought them through so many difficulties and milestones. In the public eye it would be ten times worse, being hounded and scrutinized and questioned. A simple lunch together would be nearly impossible. I wonder if they phoned each other today. They announced it to friends in an email. Eveyone says it wasn't a matter of infidelity or scandal. I'm relieved to hear that; there's been so much of that in the news.

Ironic too that the Clintons are still together, while the Gores, a symbol of constancy during the scandal-marred Clinton presidency, are broken. The Clinton marriage strikes me as more of an arrangement, a power-brokered deal to leverage their standing in the public eye. They're not believable as a couple, though I'm hardly in a position to know.

Both are likely to slip out of the spotlight in the coming years. The rest of the decade will belong to conservatism, perhaps extreme conservatism. There is a reaction and an intense anger stirring in the country that will change things beyond recognition. The economy, immigration, environmental catastrophe, heath care, and the failure of government to meaningfully and effectively address any of these large concerns have created a sinkhole that will collapse everything around it: the future, at least the immediate future, belongs to the Palins and the Pauls, the Becks and O'Reillys, the flag wavers and blame assigners and shrill critics.

While the end of the Gores' marriage is a sad footnote to the news, the divorce of reason and compassion is sadder still. There is a horde of locusts set to invade the Western grasslands this summer. The honeybees are dying and the Israelites have stirred the hornets in the Middle East. If you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction, you haven't been paying attention to the inconvenient truth.