Paul McCartney Said The Beatles’ Bond ‘Wasn’t Good’ for Their Romantic Relationships
By 1966, every Beatle but Paul McCartney was married. Their manager had tried to keep their relationships secret for fear it would alienate their fans, but this didn’t stop the Beatles from pursuing romance. According to McCartney, it was difficult to date a Beatle. He shared why he thought the bond between bandmates was difficult for their partners to handle.
Paul McCartney said The Beatles’ closeness was hard on their romantic relationships
The relationships between members of The Beatles would eventually fracture and ice over. In the early 1960s, though, they were quite close. The band did everything together even when they weren’t working on music. This meant that the women in their lives often took a secondary role.
“We had a good relationship. Even with touring there were enough occasions to keep a reasonable relationship going,” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology. “To tell the truth, the women at that time got sidelined.”
Even John Lennon’s wife, Cynthia, who had known the band long before fame, found it difficult to find a place in their close-knit circle.
“A lot of what we, The Beatles, did was very much in an enclosed scene,” McCartney explained. “Other people found it difficult — even John’s wife, Cynthia, found it very difficult — to penetrate the screen that we had around us. As a kind of safety barrier we had a lot of ‘in’ jokes, little signs, references to music; we had a common bond in that and it was very difficult for any ‘outsider’ to penetrate. That possibly wasn’t good for relationships back then.”
Paul McCartney was the last of The Beatles to get married
Despite these challenges, the members of The Beatles did have romantic relationships. By 1966, McCartney, though in a long-term relationship, was the only one who was not married. McCartney preferred his bustling lifestyle to his bandmates’ quiet, suburban ones.
“I was still living on my own in London when all the others started getting married and moving to the suburbs, on golf club estates, which wasn’t my idea of fun at all: one, because I wasn’t married and there didn’t seem any point,” he said. “(I could see it for them: they were going to raise kids out there.) And two, because I was able to stay in London I was much more involved in going to the theatre and art galleries and whatever was going on in the big metropolis.”
McCartney married in 1969 and traded city life for a quiet Scottish farm.
The band kept their relationships secret in the early years
Another strain on the band’s early romances was that they had to keep them a secret. Throughout her pregnancy, Cynthia Lennon had to pretend she did not know her husband.
“Most of the time I had to keep it secret,” she wrote in her book, John. “I had a gold wedding ring John had bought for ten pounds, but I couldn’t wear it when I went out, in case a fan who knew my face spotted me. It was hard, not being able to announce to everyone that I was married, or enjoy talking about the baby. I had few of the joys of being a young wife looking forward to the birth of her child.”
The secret of their relationships did not last long, though. News inevitably leaked out and fans began to target The Beatles’ partners.
