McCartney: We Can't Work It Out

(CBS/AP)  Try to see it my way,
Do I have to keep on talking till I can't go on?
While you see it your way,
Run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone.

Former Beatle Paul McCartney and his wife, Heather Mills McCartney, said Wednesday they are separating after nearly four years of marriage.

A statement issued by McCartney and his second wife said they had "found it increasingly difficult to maintain a normal relationship with constant intrusion into our private lives."

The brief statement said that "with sadness" the couple agreed to "go our separate ways" but said the parting was "amicable."

McCartney married Mills in June 2002, four years after his first wife, Linda McCartney, died of breast cancer. McCartney and Mills had a daughter in October 2003.

"Separation for any couple is difficult enough, but to have to go through this so publicly, especially with a small daughter, is immensely stressful," the statement said. "We hope, for the sake of our baby daughter, that we will be given some space and time to get through this difficult period."

Britain's Daily Mirror, however, reports the two have had a series of bitter arguments, and that McCartney is moving out of the home he shares with the former model and anti-land mine campaigner.

McCartney is also quoted as having told a friend: "We really can't go on like this. Enough is enough."

Mills just last week, according to the BBC, soft-pedaled reports that she and McCartney were living at separate addresses, telling a newspaper reporter at that time: "It's hilarious. Of course we are together ... Paul and I are still very much together. Paul and I are together 100 percent."

Mills, a former model who threw herself into charitable activity after losing a leg in an accident, first met McCartney at a fundraiser and has had his vocal support in her chosen causes – artificial limbs for amputees and the campaign to remove and ban landmines, promoted on his most recent concert tour.

She has responded in kind when it comes to public support of issues McCartney cares about, and in March she accompanied him to an ice floe off the coast of Canada to take a stand against the annual fur traders' hunt of baby seals.