Neo-Neocon on the Gore's marriage breakup:
I don't know. I'm always surprised that people make it married this long. Just because you get older doesn't mean that you become a person willing to tolerate anything, just to "make it until death do you part." Maybe, if your marriage is not a good one, you figure you better get out before you die.
It’s almost always upsetting and even somewhat shocking to hear of a long, long marriage gone bad.
People are wondering why? WHY? You made it through all sorts of tough stuff, the way all couples married for forty-one years must. Couldn’t you just hold on till death do you part?
I don't know. I'm always surprised that people make it married this long. Just because you get older doesn't mean that you become a person willing to tolerate anything, just to "make it until death do you part." Maybe, if your marriage is not a good one, you figure you better get out before you die.
Labels: marriage
posted by Helen at 7:00 AM
28 Comments:
I've only been married 25 years so I am not sure that my opinion is all that relative when thinking about the dissolution of a 40 year marriage but I have to say that when I read the phrase "They just grew apart" I think that it is the saddest phrase to put to a marriage.
It's the money.
When you're living a life where you depend on each other, then you're not going to get divorced.
When you're really rich, you can afford to do almost anything you want. Almost all problems can be solved by throwing enough money at them.
I was married for sixteen years. My parents were accepting the divorce at first, then pulled the "stay together for the sake of the children" stuff. Right. Stay together, let the kids see people who do not want to be around each other and no longer have a foundation of love and respect. Not helpful.
One question that I raised to nay-sayers is: Do I have to spend the rest of my life paying for this mistake?
As we got older, we grew apart. I developed in different areas mentally, emotionally, spiritually while she simply turned into her mother.
The Clintons are still married.
Al Gore, the ultimate beta-male, is getting divorced.
WTF.
"As we got older, we grew apart. I developed in different areas mentally, emotionally, spiritually while she simply turned into her mother."
This is possibly my biggest fear about marriage - that I will grow and change in certain ways and my wife won't grow or change at all (except in the girth department).
I abhor boredom with people (part of why I'm an introvert and a mild misanthrope) so the idea of coming home to a boring/bored person every night scares me to death.
Topher,
My temperament sounds similar to yours. But I have been with my husband for 20 years, married for 16 and have never felt bored in my life. I think you just have to find the right person and be accepting of what they are. I do understand your fear, however.
"This is possibly my biggest fear about marriage ..."
----
Well, it will liven things up a little bit when you then have to give her half your stuff after she gets bored with the marriage. Or you get bored with her fat butt.
Al Gore, the ultimate beta-male, is getting divorced.
WTF.
Given that she can take him for half of his net worth, perhaps she decided that she didn't have to put up with him anymore. I'll bet she initiated the divorce.
"My temperament sounds similar to yours. But I have been with my husband for 20 years, married for 16 and have never felt bored in my life. I think you just have to find the right person and be accepting of what they are. I do understand your fear, however."
Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I hate to stereotype, but my experience is that most urban American women I meet are boring - intellectually null, self-obsessed about being "fabulous," attention whorish, without ambition, pathologically insecure about both men and women, spending valuable time reading Oprah magazine and Cosmo, waiting to be "taken care of" so they can stop growing as a person and start growing in the waistline. And I've lived in three of the most-educated cities in America!
"Given that she can take him for half of his net worth, perhaps she decided that she didn't have to put up with him anymore. I'll bet she initiated the divorce."
I'm willing to give Al and Tipper the benefit of the doubt on this one and say they honestly are in a mutual no-fault case where they just decided to drop it. Although having a boatload of cash certainly helps.
ps. My temperament doesn't go over well with a lot of guys either - I'm an unusually busy person so it's hard to sit still and watch the game or scope out hot chicks.
At the risk of doing a lot of talking on this thread, I've committed myself to the radical idea that any relationship should build your life, not take away from it. If it's not making your life better, maybe it's not the right thing to be doing. Thus I react with annoyance when I hear women complain about "child-men" and "I do his laundry and he won't propose and he doesn't love me for it!" Decide what you want, honey.
I see the following in arguments for marriage: "Marriage makes a man work to his potential."
Sort of. The key word here is "immediacy" - you need money. This might prevent a man from starting a business, changing careers, or other high-risk work operations, or putting more attention into his pursuits that really make him a person, living up to his "potential." Society has tried to shame men into thinking that their own pursuits are selfish and their primary worth is in surplus production.
Likewise, the Jonah Goldberg argument that "women civilize men" is only true if men are given the opportunity to lead, build something and be appreciated. Today's feminized marriages and families are destructive to the male psyche. And I don't even have to bring up matriarchal sub-societies like urban black America.
Just because you get older doesn't mean that you become a person willing to tolerate anything, just to "make it until death do you part."
And yet, that is exactly what one promises when making this vow...
Al Gore made a fortune off the global warming/environmental disaster scam. Now that that has been exposed as a total scam, his earning potential is drastically lower, if not in fact nonexistent.
So Tipper decided to walk while the walking was good.
Actually, I really don't think that was the case. Yeah, it can be said that this split is about the money, and it may very well be, but I think it's more about Al becoming insufferable.
If you look at recent pictures, he's taken to dressing in movie star black (think Al Pacino), while she retains her traditional modest attire. That suggests a personality shift of profound proportions.
Not all marriages are going to work. Things happen, people change, what was then is no longer now. I understand that. The problem is that the marriage contract was written and codified at a time when the average life expectancy was 35. So people had to marry at the age of 14 in order to raise children, because if they waited odds were they'd be dead before the children could take care of themselves.
Life expectancies today are in the 70s and 80s, which explains why people postpone marriage until their late 20s or 30s. But given the number of years they expect to live, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a relationship as time goes by. This is the nature of the modern world.
By the way, I am shocked, shocked, that some of you aren't complaining about how much money Tipper is going to get. It couldn't possibly be because that's what she's entitled to under the terms and conditions of the contract, could it?
I mean, it's not like Al betrayed Tipper, as Tiger did Elin. And it's not like Tipper married Al to divorce him and walk off with a whole lot of money, as Heather did Paul.
No, this is an amicable split. The couple simply grew apart and mutually agreed to sever their relationship.
Tipper is entitled to what she is entitled to, just as Elin is and just as Heather was, under the terms and conditions of the marriage contract. The difference here being that this is a normal divorce proceeding. Cite irreconcilable differences after 40 years, if you will.
Whereas with Elin, she was betrayed by her husband. And she deserves the full compensation she is entitled to, under the law, due to that fact.
With Paul, he was betrayed by his (second) wife, who perpretated an act of fraud, deceit and theft upon him. Unfortunately, that is not a prosecutable crime, because under the current terms and conditions of the marriage contract, she can dissolve the marriage at any time for any reason, or no reason, and still remain entitled to what she is entitled to.
People who have no problem with how much Tipper is going to get, but have a real problem with how much Elin is going to get, and have nothing to say about how much Paul had to pay, miss the salient point. The terms and conditions of the marriage contract simply must be changed so that an equitable and fair relationship between co-equal partners can be formed.
OK. Wrote mine, brought it up for preview and saw GawainsGhost's.
Much better written than mine and I agree. Mine hit the virtual waste can.
No, this is an amicable split. The couple simply grew apart and mutually agreed to sever their relationship.
Doubtful. Not the grew apart portion but the amicability.
I think Tipper just can stand the crazy slob any more.
I don't know what our blog hostess's professional opinion would be (or whether she would offer one) but ManBearPig might have held it together for a little while after 1/20/2001 but he gives all the indications of having gone bat-shit crazy since then. Have you seen some of the statements he makes regarding global warming? His movie has been ruled by British court to a sick joke of propaganda and he makes comments like the core of the Earth having a tempature of millions of degrees.
It's not rocket science. You find someone who is capable of fixing the problem, put him/her in charge, make sure he/she has the resources needed, and keep everyone else out of the way.
Just the opposite of what Obama is doing.
Likewise, the Jonah Goldberg argument that "women civilize men" is only true if men are given the opportunity to lead, build something and be appreciated. Today's feminized marriages and families are destructive to the male psyche. And I don't even have to bring up matriarchal sub-societies like urban black America.
topher, you are a smart guy. sharp in fact.
careful you don`t cut yourself.
cut yourself off from the love of a good woman. and i mean that in the best possible terms.
maybe that woman will push you to your emotional potential.
my youngest boy is 11 and he`s really good on the soccer field. he just gets lazy.
so i told him he seemed to be not as good as some of the boys on the other team.
he scored three goals in the second half.
sometimes our internal shove doesn`t take us far enough. we need a compassionate push from another.
who knows why the gores are splitting...the boy hasn`t blinked in fifty years. maybe it just got tired for tipper.
there is a character on canadian tv called super dave who has more than a passing resemblance to algore...and i never see them together. hmm.
and what do i know, i`ve only been married a month.
Why does everyone focus on how wonderful Tipper was? What's she known for? Censoring music and blaming Ice-T for LA's crime wave.
Usually, the people who push for censorship, prohibition, and the like, are pretty damned unbearable ("people" often, but not always, meaning "prudish women who hate it when anyone else has a good time").
my parents have been married for 63 years. no it was not easy.. we saw things after just 15 years we would have rather have not seen.. let alone in the years therafter. but they stuck it out.. not for the kids..but for their own integrity and love whatever that meant to them, for each other. they married at the age of 20.
are their 6 children damaged? i would say no.. my siblings may disagree, but then we all have our own minds. personally, as i watch them now at their age, i am glad to see they survived their marriage. what a love they have.
alistair,
With my Goldberg neg, I wasn't saying I don't need women...I was talking about people who try to shame men into "growing up" and getting into a one-sided marriage with a suboptimal partner.
Men don't get "civilized" married to bitchy, bossy women, any more than women are "feminized" by marrying a controlling oaf.
Like I said before, a good relationship will bring out the best in both. That doesn't mean getting into ANY relationship is going to "fix" somebody, which seems to be the subtext of these "men are better when married" coercions.
My parents were married 43 years, until Dad died last October from a 30+ year battle with diabetes. Mom was a nurse and took extremely good care of him up to his death, even doing his home dialysis so well that doctors and nurses who specialized in dialysis were impressed with her ability.
They started out pretty poor, living with Dad's Mom, and worked together to become upper middle class. They approached marriage like partners, with clear roles, and discussed the issues in the marriage like coworkers would discuss maintaining a valuable, if sometimes difficult, contract. Like gardeners tending their plants (and they had a huge flowering garden out back) they did continual, deliberate work to keep it strong.
Most people fail to do anything like this in their marriages these days, it seems. Mostly people see the marriage as an end, and seem to think it will be self-maintaining. That they don't have to make allowances for changes that occur in the environment the marriage is in. That they don't have to pay attention to it. This is why they fail. The how of the failure can take any form and will occur at any time... like the failure of an engine that never gets maintenance beyond an oil change.
There is no other reason, really. The different reasons are just the symptoms of the lack of focus on the marriage. If people worked at their marriages like they do their favorite hobbies or careers, divorce and infidelity would be extremely rare. Perhaps only caused by issues related to mental health.
topher, i agree about good relationships bringing out the best. i play competitive soccer and i`ve played on a number of teams in various divisions in the region, and the best teams have always been the ones where mutual respect was high.
i had to quit one team the day before our league cup final because of the increasing tension between players, mostly because of rivalries.
my last relationship was like that. she was in competition with me and i didn`t realise it until recently when the penny finally dropped.
my wife and i don`t compete. we compliment. i can do some stuff really well and she can do some stuff really well and we happily just get on with things and enjoy eachother and revel in eachother`s success.
The Clintons remain together because they are best friends and they value the history they have together.
The Gores, not so much.
Well, my sister's husband worked for Al Gore in the VP Whitehouse during the Clinton administration. I won't go into it, but Al Gore is as stiff as a cold, dead fish. He is all "I, ME, Mine".
I've heard many stories over dinner and wine. Not the least of which that, although my sister and her husband are democrats (shudder) they would never have voted for him - or Clinton - after they learned what they learned in those eight years.
Consider it is a known fact Tipper has battles with cancer, and has suffered depression (understandable, considering who she married) and no one wants to touch that.
Alexandro, you are on drugs if you believe what you just posted.
Topher
If your greatest fear of marriage is boredom, you are sorely lacking in experience or imagination. Boredom means that everything is going OK, there is no screaming insanity going on at present or likely to occur in the near future. Boredom is infinitely preferable to Drama.
I just can't shake the feeling that Al, cold dead fish that he may be, has someone waiting in the wings.
He has built a substantial net worth over the last few years and I just can't see any man risking that for "mere happiness" unless there is another woman ready and waiting to welcome him with open arms once he leaves his wife.
He may be a cold fish but I have no trouble imagining someone throwing herself at him because she was in love with the image (as opposed to the reality) of the Goreacle.
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