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Let’s be honest: Nobody would be talking about the Gore breakup were it not for The Kiss.

The Kiss doesn’t
get the top line on the Al Gore resume, of course. He did win a Nobel
Prize and an Oscar, after all. He also has won the enmity of every
climate-change denier/skeptic across the world.

What’s strange is
that Gore, of all people, has excited such emotions. What made The Kiss
so remarkable was that people weren’t necessarily sure Gore had human
emotions.

It wasn’t the
all-time great kiss. That would have to be the sailor-meets-nurse Times
Square kiss on V-J Day that made the cover of Life magazine.

The Gores’ kiss wasn’t exactly the Rodin sculpture either, although Al Gore has been accused of being at least semi-immobile.

(By the way, the most-cited Gore-breakup joke so far: Tipper gets half the Internet.)

But as political kisses go, it was certainly memorable, if not necessarily in a good way.

I was showing a
photograph of The Kiss to a friend at the office, who said, “I wish I
hadn’t seen that. It’s like having a hair caught in your throat.”

The kiss was almost
certainly staged. This is politics, after all. But real or fake or (my
guess) real and fake, The Kiss was meant to represent the notion that
the Gores were a real couple and nothing like the Clintons.

Without the Monica
Lewinsky affair, there would have been no kiss. There also would have
been no impeachment and possibly no George W. Bush presidency, just so
you understand the stakes.

Strangely, the
Clintons’ strange marriage continues, and now the Gores are splitting
up. That’s the bet that no one would have taken and everyone would have
lost. It’s a reminder of how little we actually know about other
people. Face it, we barely know ourselves.

In 2000, Al Gore
wanted to remove himself as far as possible from the Clinton drama.
Tipper Gore had said how upset she was that Hillary hadn’t left Bill.
Al Gore had said he felt personally betrayed.

No one was
officially more upset by Clinton’s behavior than the Gores. It was as
if the pair were getting their advice on the lovelorn from the Gallup
poll.

And yet, after Gore
lost the triple-overtime election to Bush, Bill Clinton left office
with 60 percent approval ratings. And Hillary Clinton, of course,
nearly became the nation’s first female president.

Whatever else,
though, the Clinton marriage is famously complicated. The Gores wanted
to show that their marriage was just like yours, if you, too, had been
married at the National Cathedral.

And so, we got The
Kiss, which was so embarrassingly real-looking – a kiss that seemed
more like a teenage grope – that it had to be mostly real, even if it
was planned.

But now people
wonder. The Gores have been married for 40 years. Forty years is
forever. Forty years is so long that everything that could happen to a
couple has already happened. The scars are all there to prove it.

You don’t wake up
after 40 years and suddenly discover something is wrong with your
partner. When you wake up after 40 years, you’re just glad you woke up
at all, even if your spouse’s underwear is on the floor.

But the Gores are
in their early 60s, which we like to say is the new early 40s, meaning
plenty of time to have a different, if not entirely new, life. They
were married at ages 21 and 22 to the tune of “All You Need Is Love.”
They had four kids, one who nearly died. They had enough highs and lows
for several lives. And apparently they just bought a new
multimillion-dollar mansion, this one a 6,900-square-foot carbon
footprint, for at least one of them to live in.

You’d like to hope
that this won’t turn into a Tiger Woods story or a Jesse James-Sandra
Bullock story. (Which proves, if nothing else, you’re asking for
trouble if you marry someone named Jesse James. Who’s the divorce
lawyer? Billy the Kid?)

If you want to read
a story about the Gores, read the Time piece from 2000 by Tamala
Edwards and Karen Tumulty, who quoted Gore as saying he and Tipper were
the “old cliché about opposites attracting.”

The authors pointed to a dinner party that Al gave to discuss the “declining role of metaphor in American life.”

Tipper, meanwhile,
liked to take the kids rollerblading in the Senate hallways. And, of
course, she played drums, despite her once-famous spat with Frank
Zappa.

Meanwhile, Al was writing books on climate change.

In other words, it
sounds like it was once a real marriage. Or as the great philosopher
Chuck Berry put it in his ode to young marriage: “C’est la vie, say the
old folks. It goes to show you never can tell.”

Mike Littwin is a columnist for The Denver Post

© The New York Times 2010