Skip to main content

TL;DR: 

  • John Lennon and his first wife, Cynthia Lennon, met in Liverpool.
  • The couple’s classmates said that he was lucky to date her.
  • John Lennon and his wife divorced in 1968.
A black and white picture of John Lennon and his wife Cynthia Lennon wearing coats and hats and sitting in chairs.
John Lennon and Cynthia | Bettmann/Contributor via Getty

John Lennon and his first wife, Cynthia Lennon, met at art school in Liverpool long before he became a famous musician. She wasn’t initially interested in him, but he won her over with his music. According to the couple’s classmates, Lennon was lucky to be with someone like Cynthia. 

John Lennon met his first wife at school

Lennon and Cynthia both attended the Liverpool College of Art, and they met there in 1957. When they met, she was dating someone else, but she felt drawn to Lennon.

“You couldn’t resist being around him,” she said, per ABC News. “You couldn’t resist watching what he was up to. I mean, he was a total rebel. Everybody was amazed by him.”

She began to think of Lennon as a potential romantic partner when she saw him playing music. All of his hard edges seemed to soften.

“It softened…. All the aggression lifted,” she said, per the book John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman. “At last there was something I had seen in John that I could understand.”

Classmates said she was out of his league

Cynthia altered her appearance in order to catch Lennon’s eye. Eventually, they bonded over the fact that they both had recently lost parents. At a party in 1958, Lennon asked her to dance, and their relationship deepened from there. 

When their classmates saw Lennon and Cynthia were together, they were surprised. In their eyes, Cynthia was out of Lennon’s league. 

“Cynthia was a catch for John,” classmate Ann Mason said. “She could have had anyone she wanted. She had lovely eyes and the most beautiful pale skin. And she was the sweetest, nicest person you could ever meet.”

They could see why the couple fit together, though. Lennon was looking for a maternal presence, and Cynthia provided him with it.

“I think [she] offered him a kind of mother thing,” Lennon’s first girlfriend, Thelma Pickles, said. “She was so warm and gentle. She was the kind of person anyone would have been proud to have as a mother.”

John Lennon and his first wife divorced in 1968

In 1962, Cynthia became pregnant, and the couple got married. They shared a son, Julian, and remained together for four years. Lennon began an affair with Yoko Ono, though, and he divorced Cynthia in 1968.

“[After the divorce] I didn’t [stop] loving him or caring for him or worrying about him, I mean, because I didn’t have any anger or bitterness about it,” Cynthia told NPR. “I had a lot of hurt. But, of course, I was looking after his interests, in my own little way, and caring about his future and hoping that he was happy, because he’d had to go through such hell to do what he did.”

Best in Entertainment