Former Beatle Paul McCartney and his second wife, Heather Mills, have announced they are separating.
A brief statement issued Wednesday by the couple says they have found it increasingly difficult to maintain a normal relationship, given the daily pressures surrounding them. It said the couple, who have been married four years, agreed to go their separate ways, but that the parting was amicable.
The 63-year-old McCartney and the 38-year-old former model Mills married in June 2002 in Ireland, four years after the singer's first wife, Linda McCartney, died of breast cancer. He and Mills have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Beatrice.
They met in 1999 through Mill's charity, the Heather Mills Health Trust, which she launched after losing part of her leg in a motorcycle accident in 1993.