Yoko Ono Revealed How She Told John Lennon They Needed to Separate
John Lennon and Yoko Ono married in 1969 and, four years later, decided they needed a break from one another. They argued with a rising level of intensity and spent all of their time together. As Lennon spoke about how miserable he felt, Ono pitched a temporary separation. She shared how she brought this up to him.
Yoko Ono and John Lennon decided they needed some time apart
In 1973, Lennon and Ono’s situation became unbearable. They fought constantly and spent all of their time together. While they loved each other, they both reached breaking points. Ono said there wasn’t one big, blowout fight before they decided on a separation, though. She quietly suggested a separation when Lennon complained about feeling unhappy.
“One night John and I were lying in bed in the Dakota, and John kept saying how miserable he was, how he needed to get away,” Ono recalled in the book The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of The Beatles by Steven Gaines and Peter Brown. “I said that we had been together twenty-four hours a day for five years and that I needed some time apart for myself. I told him, ‘Why don’t you go to Los Angeles?’”
While this moment had begun to feel inevitable for the couple, Lennon seemed surprised by the suggestion.
“What would I do there?” he asked her.
She told him to call Phil Spector and get to work on an album. As he said he couldn’t go alone, Ono suggested that he bring their assistant, May Pang. He would come to describe this period of time as his lost weekend.
He began a relationship with the couple’s assistant during the separation
Pang had worked for the couple for several years, so Ono believed she would be a good choice to support her husband. Ono was aware when Lennon and Pang’s relationship became physical, but she said it did not bother her.
“We decided on May because she was the most efficient secretary available,” Ono said. “It was not a love affair, although the relationship might have been physical. But then, John had a lot of girls. . . . May remained on salary the whole time she was with John, and she reported to me almost daily.”
Ono denied that their relationship was a love affair, but Pang told a different story. While the separation between Lennon and Ono only lasted a year and a half, she claimed her affair with him went on longer.
“He’d secretly come over to see me. He would say, ‘You know, I still love you,'” she told People. “He said things to me that were really very intimate and you could sense there was something still. It was gnawing at him. It was not a finished situation.”
John Lennon and Yoko Ono reunited after his ‘lost weekend’
In 1975, Lennon’s lost weekend came to an end. He moved back in with Ono and said he felt lost without her.
“[The separation] didn’t work out. And the reaction to the breakup was all that madness,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was like a chicken without a head.”
They remained together until his death in 1980.
