John Lennon was the first Beatle to get married, and Paul McCartney was the last. Though McCartney was in a relationship with Jane Asher for most of the 1960s, he felt their dynamic was more relaxed than it would have been if they were married. He said that Lennon also recognized this and was jealous of it.
Paul McCartney Said John Lennon was jealous of his relationship
In 1963, McCartney and Asher, a London-based actor, began dating. McCartney moved into her family’s home later that year, and they continued dating until 1968. Though McCartney and Asher lived together for most of their relationship, he felt a great deal of freedom. He continued to date around while they were together.
“Living in the Asher house gave me the base and the freedom and the independence,” McCartney said in the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “That, alongside all the other things, because I wasn’t married to Jane. I was pretty free.”
McCartney said that Lennon, who was married with a child, grew jealous of this freedom.
“He said, ‘Well, if you go out with another girl, what does Jane think?’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t care what she thinks, we’re not married. We’ve got a perfectly sensible relationship,’” McCartney recalled. “He was well jealous of that, because at this time he couldn’t do that, he was married with Cynthia and with a lot of energy bursting to get out.”
Paul McCartney recognized that John Lennon’s first marriage wasn’t going to last
When Lennon expressed his jealousy, McCartney realized his bandmate wasn’t built for the traditional relationship he’d settled into.
“He’d tried to give Cynthia the traditional thing, but you kind of knew he couldn’t,” McCartney said. “There were cracks appearing but he could only paste them over by staying at home and getting very wrecked.”
In 1967, The Beatles took a train to Wales for a seminar on Transcendental Meditation. Lennon left his wife, Cynthia, with their bags and jumped on the train without her. She missed it, standing at the station and crying as it pulled away from her. McCartney recognized this moment as the end of the Lennons’ marriage.
“I remember Cynthia not making the train, which was terrible and very symbolic,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “She was the only one of our party not to get there. There’s a bit of film of her not making it. That was the end of her and John, really, weirdly enough.”
When did John and Cynthia Lennon divorce?
Not long after this, the couple ended their marriage. In 1968, Lennon admitted to having cheated on Cynthia with hundreds of women. While he insisted he wanted to make their marriage work, Cynthia returned home several weeks later to find him wearing matching bathrobes with Yoko Ono in their kitchen.
This was the final nail in the coffin of their shaky marriage. The pair divorced in 1968.
