Al and Tipper Gore: An unexpected, unsettling breakup

The marital split of Al and Tipper Gore is like watching our own parents break up.
Meghan Daum
June 3, 2010

In a week in which we've seen the Israeli flotilla raid, mounting devastation in the BP oil spill and a spate of noteworthy deaths, one news item seems to have delivered a particularly strong jolt: the marital split of Al and Tipper Gore.

A statement (which is to say, an e-mail circulated among their friends and close associates) from the Gores, who have been married for 40 years, referred to "a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration." A few of these friends and associates anonymously told reporters that there was no affair involved and that the couple had drifted apart in recent years.

The Gore children are grown (the youngest is 26; the oldest 37). So while they're presumably experiencing some dismay over the situation, they're not exactly facing a future of being shuffled between two households and forced to go to the zoo on weekends with their hapless, guilt-ridden dad.

Much of the public, on the other hand, seems to be reacting as if Al and Tipper were their own parents, who sat them down in the living room for an emergency family meeting that started with those ominous words "your father and I both love you very much." Within hours of the news breaking, anxious entries on Internet comment boards quickly ran into the thousands. "I hope the 'kids' handle it okay," said one commenter on the Huffington Post. Another pleaded, "If you're happily married, please raise your hand and restore my faith in the institution."

The idea that the Gores represented some kind of marital ideal, that their union offered a beacon of hope to those who aspire to make it to their silver anniversary or beyond, seems to be a major thread. Rebecca Traister of Salon allowed that there were more pressing matters in the headlines but that she was nonetheless "unexpectedly gutted" by the news of the Gore split.

"Forty years," Traister wrote. "You get through forty years — of ill-behaved children and ill-behaved bosses and stolen elections — and then you split? This is precisely the kind of mysterious and inexplicable narrative of marriage … that scares the bejesus out of people who are newly or not yet married."

True, it's not the most pleasant news to wake up to, not least because the Gores were among the few political couples you could actually picture growing old together and eating dinner on TV trays while admiring Ed Bradley's earring on "60 Minutes." But that's an image that's every bit as reductive as the image of the Clintons as a loveless power duo or even the Obamas as a millennial version of the Kennedys (i.e. healthier and more egalitarian but less sexy). It can be hard enough to fully grasp the dynamics of one's own marriage, let alone another person's.

And while celebrity relationships have always played a key role in the cultural imagination, there's often a circus-like quality to the fascination, a sense that maintaining a private coupling in a public arena is a trick on the order of a bear riding a bicycle. In other words, we can't stop looking at these people, and it's not because we think we're "just like them." More often, whether we're talking about Brangelina or Bill and Hillary, it's because we so rarely see anything like them. They are our opposites. Whether they're happy or unhappy, inspirational or the stuff of cautionary tales, they still have an aura that feels more like the exception than the rule.

But you can't quite say that about the Gores. Sure, they had their moments of glamour: The infamous (and, in retrospect, surely rather forced) wet kiss during the 2000 presidential election. The semi-captivating weirdness of Tipper's journey from schoolmarmish proponent of warning labels on music (and No. 1 enemy of Frank Zappa) to friend of Zappa's widow and featured drummer on his daughter's album. But let's face it, there's a reason we can picture them eating dinner on TV trays. They're a bit of a snore.

And that — more than the 40 years together, more than the memory of that kiss — is what makes their breakup surprisingly upsetting. After all, in the contemporary imagination, breakups are for interesting people, for edgy people, for people whose appetites for attention or adoration or affection seem greater than anything that can be met by one person. And while the Gores, especially Al, can hardly be seen as unambitious or unwanting of accolades, they've also never been all that exciting. Why? Because they've always seemed too much like our parents. No wonder we've been crying in our rooms this week.