John Lennon Told Cynthia Lennon That Yoko Ono Was ‘Not Important’ After She Discovered Their Affair

When Cynthia Lennon discovered John Lennon and Yoko Ono were having an affair, she was certain her marriage was over. Lennon didn’t seem to agree, though. When the married couple discussed his affair, he said that Ono meant little to him. He’d had many affairs, he said, and Ono meant as much to him as these other women.

John Lennon insisted that Yoko Ono wasn’t as important to him as his wife

After Cynthia discovered Lennon and Ono together, she fled to a friend’s house for several days. She expected to have a conversation about the end of her marriage when she returned home, but Lennon didn’t acknowledge what she’d discovered. Instead, he kissed her on the cheek as if nothing had happened. 

“It was evening before John and I had a chance to talk,” Cynthia wrote in her book John. “I had to steel myself for the confrontation we would usually avoid to ask him what was happening with Yoko. ‘Oh her?’ he said, as if surprised that I’d asked. ‘Nothing, it’s not important.’”

Still, Cynthia insisted that they talk about the affair. It hadn’t felt like nothing to her when she found them in her home. Lennon insisted that he wanted the marriage to work.

“Eventually we did talk, perhaps more honestly and in more depth than we had since our student days,” she wrote. “We talked of our failings and faults, our love for each other, our hopes and dreams. John talked again about his other women, and insisted that Yoko was no more important than they had been. ‘It’s you I love, Cyn’  he said. ‘I love you now more than I ever have before.’”

He filed for divorce not long after this conversation 

For several days, Cynthia felt a renewed hope that her marriage would survive. Before long, though, he began to put her at a distance. When she asked if she could join him on a business trip to New York, he flatly refused. Instead, she went to Italy with their son, Julian, and her mother. 

While they were on vacation, Lennon indirectly informed Cynthia that he wanted a divorce. Lennon’s friend, “Magic” Alex Mardas, arrived with a message from the Beatle.

“I asked Alex what was going on,” Cynthia wrote. “He said, ‘I’ve come with a message from John. He’s going to divorce you, take Julian away from you, and send you back to Hoylake.’”

Yoko Ono said she and John Lennon were drawn to one another

Ono said that while she respected Cynthia, she felt that her marriage to Lennon was not going well. This made room for them to have an affair. She felt that they were helpless to stop themselves.

“Obviously, their marriage was not going gloriously; otherwise, he wouldn’t want to have me around,” she said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “The thing is, John and I fell in love. But he was a man of the world by then. He wasn’t a virgin. I think he’s one of those people who took marriage very seriously and I do too … So to leave that and get together, there had to be a very strong reason for it. But as John said, it was bigger than both of us.”

Lennon and Cynthia divorced in 1968. The following year, he married Ono.