Al and Tipper Gore Did Not Have 'Perfect Marriage' -- Who Knew?

When my first husband and I separated after 25 years of marriage, our stunned friends and relatives said, "You were the last couple we thought would get divorced." On the surface we had it all: a beautiful house, charming children, a devoted dog. But underneath the glossy Ordinary People surface were cracks that made us vulnerable, and when the ground beneath us shifted, our "perfect world" fell apart.

In other words, it is really not such a big surprise that the poster couple for the ideal political marriage, Tipper and Al Gore, are getting divorced after 40 years while Hillary and Bill Clinton's tumultuous marriage, which could have been the model for the verbally combative couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, remains intact. The only perfect marriage exists in the grey matter of marriage counselors who fantasize about real-life couples using I-words to express their feelings and doing a lot of reflective listening.

As soon as the media announced that Tipper and Al Gore were getting a divorce, inquiring minds started wondering about possible motivations. The official version of the story, that Tipper and Al had grown apart, seemed too cliché. Surely there was a far more interesting cause for the rift, such as Tipper cheating on Al or vice versa. One late night comedian even joked that Al Gore was having an affair with the planet.

Although Tipper and Al Gore's frequent PDAs, most notably a prolonged kiss on stage at the Democratic convention in 2000, made some people think the couple was immune from the Big D, while Hillary and Bill Clinton's habitual glares and frigid body language screamed Divorce Court, the two couples prove that when it comes to which marriages will unravel and which will remain intact, a lot may depend on how much they are willing to tolerate each other's character flaws and annoying habits (her eyelash batting, which he found cute when they were dating, is now like Chinese water torture; she finds herself picturing him as a sprouting potato as he loafs on the couch).

Ultimately, marriages are a lot like that old TV show, Let's Make a Deal. On the outside, Door Number Two may look better than Door Number Three, but only Monty Hall knows what's on the other side of the door. While a marriage may look picture perfect on the outside, only the husband and wife know what is really going on behind closed doors, and even they can be surprised in the end.