Interesting that Paul has stopped using marriage metaphors. I was under the impression that he did and still does a lot for some reason. I guess media and outsiders still do so maybe that's why?
Do you know when he stopped? Do you have the last time he did? (that's probably hard to find, sorry) Do you have any hunches as to why? My impression was that he was getting more open about this if anything
Yeah, it is easy to get the impression that Paul still uses these metaphors to this day because he has grown increasingly open about his love for John, and the media frames their relationship as a love story more than ever before. However, the surprising truth is that he hasn't actually used them since the late 80s (if any of you has an example that proves otherwise, please let me know). While he still occasionally refers to The Beatles' breakup as a "divorce," that is always in reference to the band as a collective entity, not his specific relationship with John. Paul’s usage of romantic and marriage language was strictly confined to a window between the early 70s and 1987. Immediately following the band's split, his analogies were raw: “You just don’t want to know about your ex-wife or ex-husband. After all the bitchiness, you feel the desire for a complete break.” A bit later, he echoed this: “There’s no hard feelings or anything, but you just don’t hang around with your ex-wife. We’ve completely finished.”
The 80s, however, brought his most explicit and surprisingly candid romantic analogies:
1981: "I understood what happened when he met Yoko. He had to clear the decks of his old emotions. He went through all his old affairs, confessed them all. Me and Linda did that when we first met. You prove how much you love someone by confessing all that old stuff. John's method was to slag me off."
1984: "Then also we were like married, so you got the bitterness. It’s not a woman scorned this time, it’s two men scorned — probably even worse. And I had to make way for Yoko. My relationship with John could not have remained as it was and Yoko feel secure."
1985: "Really all that happened was that John fell in love. With Yoko. And so, with such a powerful alliance like that, it was difficult for him to still be seeing me. It was as if I was another girlfriend, almost. Our relationship was a strong relationship. And if he was to start a new relationship, he had to put this other one away."
1987: “It’s just like divorce. It’s that you were so close and so in love that if anyone decides to start talking dirty — great, then Pandora’s box is open. That’s what happened with us.”
Though he did seem to hesiate a little when it was the interviewer who used that terminology, as we can see in this 1982 interview (though he did ultimately agree with the comparison):
Q: When the rift started [between you and John], it was more like a divorce, like a love/hate relationship, coming apart. Is that true?
PAUL: Yes. It sounds weird when you use that analogy because then it takes on another meaning. But yes, it's true. What I mean is that there was that kind of deep feeling and deep heat [laughs].
lso worth noticing is that this was also the only period in which Paul claimed John told him "Jealous Guy" was written about him, which is something he has never repeated since. By the 90s, the shift began. In the Anthology documentary, he did say, "I can't just let John take control of the situation and dump us as if we were jilted girlfriends," but here he utilized his now classic, protective plural "us," softening the phrase into a rather playful analogy. Since then, that specific category of romantic language has vanished from his vocabulary. Granted, Paul has become incredibly open in other ways recently. For example, he now openly admits that the reason they cried together in Key West was simply because of how much they loved each other (whereas in the early 2000s, he cautiously rationalized it as "probably" being about their mothers' deaths). He also speaks about John far more frequently and fondly today than he did in the 80s. In the immediate aftermath of John's death, it was likely too painful to open up, and Paul was still actively doubting whether John had truly loved him. Yet, paradoxically, that painful '80s era was the only time he used no-nonsense, openly romantic metaphors.
So, what changed after 1987? It is probable that the release of Albert Goldman’s biography in 1988, claiming that John was homosexual, had some impact on this. Paul then began making defensive counterclaims that John was very straight and that he had "slept with John a million times [sharing hotel rooms] and nothing happened", and "why not me? I'm handsome!", a defensive mantra he repeated consistently up until around 2015. He would also say things like, "If I saw John doing something, it would be ass bobbing up and down, fucking some chick." Now, in 1983, Peter Brown's book The Love You Make did strongly imply that John slept with Brian, but he didn't explicitly claimed that John was gay. When asked about it in the early 80s, Paul’s tone was much more relaxed and less defensive, saying things like: “I mean, the trouble is that he’s not here to fend for himself... John sometimes said, 'I may be gay one day, if some fella really turns me on.' He was that open about it... As far as I'm concerned, he didn't. I mean, was Peter in the room with them?” But after Goldman's book in 1988, Paul suddenly inserted himself into the narrative as proof of John's straightness, arguing that John was most likely not gay because he never made a pass at him. Coincidentally, the 90s marked the beginning of Paul's unprompted "I'm secure in my sexuality" and "I'm completely ungay" talking points.
Probably to avoid the media running away with the gay subtext, Paul permanently retired the highly revealing terms he used in the '80s ("his old affairs," "I was like another girlfriend," "in love", "ex-husband", "we were like married"). Instead, he opted for safer, more carefully chosen words that still acknowledged their profound love without inviting speculation. Fortunately, since 2016, Paul has let his guard down again. And the cultural shift surrounding the Get Back documentary and "Now and Then", which redirected the media's focus toward their deep affection rather than their late 60s and 70s acrimony, has probably made him more comfortable. I remember being very surprised when I saw him admit that he liked the idea of John writing Now and Then about him (I can't picture him saying that in the 2000s and early 2010s).
And now that I think of it, despite the media now often using this sort of language, the only interviewer who dierectly referred to their relationship using romantic terms (other than Howard Stern), right in front of Paul, was Morgan Neville: "In this documentary, there are kind of two love stories: one is you and Linda, and one is you and John." Because it was asked with genuine respect rather than Howard Stern-style sensationalism, Paul didn't get defensive; he simply offered a quiet nod (though he did raise his eyebrows a little, lol).
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