I’m a romantic. A hopeless romantic. So the news about Al and Tipper Gore separating after 40 years of marriage has left me feeling disenchanted, saddened and empty. Maybe I’m in denial or just blindly optimistic, but even with the dissolution of their marriage and the crushing divorces of so many others who cheated, or were cheated on, I still believe in the permanence of a relationship. Like I said, I’m a romantic. Hopelessly so.
I never had the experience of loving someone for decades. When my husband died I was only 38 and he was 42. I can tell you now that from the time I married him at the age of 23, I envisioned our being together forever. I couldn’t imagine I would ever love someone more than him.
I never had the good fortune of having my husband help me raise our children through all their traumas. I never got to see firsthand that adult relationships shift and turn, effected by circumstances and wisdom, and changes in taste. (I used to only drink coffee sweetened. Now, for some inexplicable reason, I like it with only a bit of cream.) I never considered that I could one day divorce a man that I had one day loved unequivocally.
But what do I know?
I ask that rhetorically.
I don’t know why the Gores’ seemingly picture-perfect marriage is dissolving. Like talk show hosts who have weighed in on the Gores’ private life, I can’t imagine that something or someone didn’t enter their marriage and cause it to implode. But then again, I need to think that. Otherwise I don’t understand.
It’s not that I don’t believe a marriage can simply crumble as it ages, like a wedge of long preserved cheese. It’s just that I haven’t had the privilege of experiencing that. My first marriage abruptly ended after 15 years. Would it have lasted another 50 or 60 years?
I’d like to think so.
But then I’m hopelessly romantic.
