Love Story

So. There were two stories I read last week on which I wanted to comment. One was the NYT piece about eroding Roe on the state level, and the other was the separation of Al and Tipper Gore.

Actually, I don't want to comment on the separation itself, but on the coverage of the announcement. I saw a lot of headlines categorizing the likely end of their 40-year marriage as "shocking," which I found rather amusing, as one must have some intimate knowledge of a marriage to be genuinely shocked by its demise, unless of course some scandalous betrayal has been made public, in which case it's only "shocking" if the couple stays together (see: the Clintons).

Many of the articles discussing the "shock" of the split referenced the Gores' passionate kiss at the 2000 Democratic convention, as though justification for the astonishment. Yes, how positively baffling that a couple who made out very publicly a decade ago could be contemplating divorce today!

The abundant invocation of the Gores' convention kiss pointedly underlined the flimsy silliness of what we think we know about other people's lives, and why we think we know it—and the collective "surprise" itself was an interesting commentary on how we feel both privy and entitled to the inner workings of public figures' relationships. Or, really, others' relationships, whether famous or not.

I was married once upon a time to a lovely guy who was a great friend. We divorced because we never should have been married in the first place; we'd mistaken a wonderful friendship and a charming affair for something bigger—and a divorce was really just our way of setting things right again. We seemed like a happy couple, and, in some ways, we were. So when we divorced, it was "shocking" to some of our friends and family. Well. The creeping feeling that you aren't suited to love another person that way for the rest of your life isn't something that one easily articulates to oneself, no less shares with people who are inclined, quite understandably, to say, "What the fuck are you thinking? Your marriage is great."

But the truth of a marriage lies between two people alone (or any long-term partnership, between whatever number of people)—and parts of what holds it together, or tears it apart, reside secretly in individual hearts, bindings or fissures that are unknowable, or indescribable, even to the person in whom they reside.

No one knows everything about any relationship, even the people in them. Which is what makes loving another person terrifying, and what makes it exhilarating.

The very thing that makes love precious also makes it a breathing thing, with ebbs and crescendos and, sometimes, an end—which may mean that love taking a different shape, like friendship. Its mutable nature, its lack of any guarantee, means that love doesn't always last forever, looking like it once did—which is seemingly what happened to the love Al and Tipper Gore had for one another. This was described in different places, as a "failure."

"They were an odd couple from the start," wrote Howard Fineman, "a teenage romance that tried—and, after 40 years, failed—to bridge the divides that were inherent in it from the start."

To which Matt Yglesias responded, "Life in a modern-day developed economy is quite long. If two people can be happy together for 38 years, during which time they raise a few kids, and then maybe be unhappy for two years and wind up realizing they want to get divorced is that really such a 'failure'? It sounds okay to me. … Failure is relative."

Indeed so.

I do not describe my previous marriage, which lasted only 1/10th the time the Gores' did, as a "failed marriage." The failure would have been to stay, to hold on and hang in and obstinately stay, to honor some idea of love that actually didn't exist between us. It was just a marriage. No qualifications required.

By any realistic measure, the Gores had a successful marriage—an accomplishment no one would deny them if one of them had died in a terrible accident last month. But because they are both still alive, and still determined to live in the best way for them, even if that way is "apart," their marriage is deemed a failure.

That's too bad. Because letting go can be an act of love, too.

And perhaps if we had a cultural narrative about marriage—or any kind of partnership—that also honored the relationships which end in letting go in life, the love stories that are journeys with destinations other than death, perhaps we would be less inclined to view two people taking steps in different directions, after some time together, as failures, and instead view them as people who know how to do love right.

This week, Iain and I will celebrate our 8th anniversary. I hope we make it to 40 years, or however long we've got together. I want, right now, to be with him for the rest of my life—and he wants the same. But if that ever changes, for either of us, I hope we can "fail" as gracefully as the Gores seem to have done.

Best wishes, and love, to Al and Tipper Gore.