They should have stayed together. If not for the kids, then for the rest of us.

That seems to be the tone of the national hand-wringing over the news that Al and Tipper Gore are separating after 40 years of marriage.

"How could they do that to us?" the chattering class is asking. "Were they even thinking about us? What are we supposed to do at Christmas? And who gets custody of our notion of a good marriage?"

At a time when we seem to be at some kind of cosmic peak in marital misbehavior, the Gores were the national model of a successful public marriage.

And they went through more than their share of bad times: An auto accident that nearly killed their young son, the unprecedented loss of the presidency. And good times: an Academy Award, a Nobel Peace Prize.

And through it all, they were still holding hands. After 40 years and so much of life together, why break up now?

My thought is, they don't owe the rest of us anything. And 60 may be the fourth quarter of life, but it isn't the final two minutes.

OK, there was the passionate kiss on the stage of the Democratic National Convention, but we put the rest of that fairy-tale baggage on Al and Tipper.

And if they want a chance at a different kind of happiness or some kind of a fresh start, they have that right. They raised the kids, they served the nation, and they put in their time.

They have earned to right to be a little selfish. They don't have to stay married until they are 90 and die within a week of each other in order to give the rest of us the happy ending we think we are entitled to.

Like you, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or the other lover. And that may yet happen.

But I think it might have been a different kind of passion that came between Al and Tipper. A something that came between them, instead of a someone.

He had his globe-trotting speech making. She had her photography and the grandkids. You have to sit across the dinner table from each other now and then to have any hope of keeping an empty-nest marriage on the tracks, and maybe there wasn't much of that.

We may never know what caused Al and Tipper to break up, and an explanation is one more thing they don't owe us. This is just more proof, if you needed it, that no one — sometimes not even the principals — can know what is going on inside a marriage.

However the Gores are handling this news, the rest of us seem to be taking it pretty hard. And we are scared. If they couldn't make it, what hope for a happily-ever-after is there for the rest of us?

We might be feeling bad for the Gores. But we are, as usual, feeling worse for ourselves.

Susan Reimer's column appears Mondays. Her e-mail is susan.reimer@baltsun.com. Twitter.com/susanreimer.