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News
Looking for updates about Beautiful Possibility while I’m researching/writing part 2? This is where you’ll find them. The newest updates will always be at the top.
6-14-25
As promised in the Wrap-Up/Q&A, I’ll continue to answer questions as they come in. Apologies that I’m a little behind in doing that, as well as answering emails overall. It’s taking me a bit longer than expected to recover from midwifing Part One into the world.
I’m going to try to post something here weekly, though not necessarily always on the same day. It might not always be much, but something. Everything posted on the “News” page will always be scruffy.
Here’s a question that came in a while back—
If Paul’s regret is that he never told John he loved him, doesn’t that mean that the love between them was unrequited?
Since we dealt with Paul’s often-expressed regret extensively throughout Part One of Beautiful Possibility, and specifically in episodes 1:5/1:6 and in the Playlist Commentary Rabbit Hole, I’m guessing the person who asked this hadn’t yet listened/read that far. So my first answer is, “keep listening/reading.” But there’s more that we could say beyond what we’ve already talked about, so let’s do that here.
First, let’s clarify our terms. “Unrequited,” “unconsummated” and “un-acted on” are three terms often confused in the discussion of the lovers possibility, but they each have very different meanings.
“Unrequited” means one person has romantic/erotic feelings that are not reciprocated/felt by the other person. “Unconsummated” means that two lovers might acknowledge and express their love/desire for one another in other ways, but haven’t expressed it through literal sexual intercourse. And “un-acted on” is when both lovers are aware of their mutual attraction/love, but for whatever reason, haven’t physically expressed (or perhaps even acknowledged) that attraction/love at all.
I think a case could be made that “unconsummated” has little to no relevance in our modern world in any relationship regardless of gender configuration — it’s a narrow and somewhat antiquated definition of sex that was probably invented for legal reasons. But either way, we’re not going to talk about whether or not John and Paul’s love for one another was “consummated,” because that kind of speculation falls outside the ethical boundaries of Beautiful Possibility. It would involve speculating on the intimate details of a possible romantic relationship between them, and those details are for Paul and John — and only Paul and John — to know.
As for “unrequited,” we talked at length throughout Part One about the abundance of research, as well as multiple lines of a priori analysis, that suggest that the romantic/erotic love between John and Paul was mutual, whether acted on or not. It’s evident throughout their music and their other published art, and in what they’ve said about their relationship in interview. We also talked at length in episode 1:4 about their body language in photographs and films, including all of those long, lingering gazes and the physical closeness they demonstrated even in public. And in episode 1:9, we talked at length about how Paul’s projects over the past few years seem to be offering us a peek inside his “shoebox of memories” of his relationship with John.
So I suspect what this question is really asking is whether Paul’s regret at feeling he couldn't tell John he loved him indicates that their mutual love and desire wasn’t acted on. And again, Part One deals extensively with the credibility of the possibility that they did, in fact, act on their mutual love/desire for one another, and we’ll continue to explore that in Part Two.
As for Paul’s regret, given the frenzied blur of Beatlemania and the haze of mind-altering drugs throughout most of their relationship, the passage of time and the self-doubt created by the distorted breakup narrative, it’s easy to see how Paul might well have said “I love you” and simply not recall having done so. This is probably in part why, in the wake of John’s murder, there are multiple stories from various sources of Paul seeking reassurance that John loved him.
But counter to his regret, Paul seems to have at least one strong memory of having told John he loved him—
“We were in Key West in 1964. We were due to fly into Jacksonville, in Florida, and do a concert there, but we’d been diverted because of a hurricane. We stayed there for a couple of days, not knowing what to do except, like, drink. I remember drinking way too much, and having one of those talking-to-the-toilet bowl evenings. It was during that night, when we’d all stayed up way too late, and we got so pissed that we ended up crying - about, you know, how wonderful we were, and how much we loved each other, even though we’d never said anything. It was a good one: you never say anything like that. Especially if you’re a Northern Man.” (Paul McCartney interview, Esquire, Alex Bilmes, July 2, 2015.) (1)
Paul’s memory of “the night we cried” is important enough in their relationship story that it features in “Here Today,” his official “love song for John.” And “the night we cried” is also a story he’s told many times in various permutations in interview and in his published memoirs. And we also know Paul said “I love you” in song, even before John’s murder — for example, in 1973’s “No Words,” which we focused on at length in episode 1:5 and which may have been key to their Lost Weekend reconciliation.
But even if it’s still somehow true that Paul never said the actual words “I love you” to John, that doesn’t tell us much, if anything, about whether or not they acted on that love.
I can speak from personal experience when I say that it’s entirely possible to have an intense, long-term romantic relationship and never say “I love you.” Looking back on my own love relationships, one of which lasted over a decade, in none of those relationships do I have a clear memory of either myself or the other person saying “I love you.”
That doesn’t mean I (and they) didn’t say it — maybe I, too, just don’t remember. But it’s highly likely I didn’t say it, because (like Paul) I have a difficult time sharing my innermost thoughts and feelings. So I can easily believe that I‘ve never said the actual words in my own relationships, but instead have attempted to show my feelings in other, less difficult, ways. Whether I’ve succeeded or not is, of course, a whole other question.
Despite his memories of “the night we cried” and the many ways in which Paul clearly seems to have shown John that he loved him, Paul seems to have similar doubts relative to John. Those doubts are reflected most explicitly in Paul’s 1989 song, “This One,” which Paul has specifically talked about in interview in the context of his relationship with John—
Did I ever take you in my arms,
Look you in the eye, tell you that I do,
Did I ever open up my heart
And let you look inside.
If I never did it, I was only waiting
For a better moment that didn't come.
There never could be a better moment
Than this one, this one.(2)
Notice in “This One” that Paul’s not saying he didn’t do or say these things. He’s asking himself (and his beloved) for reassurance that he did — which is a common reaction to sudden loss. Grieving the unexpected death of a loved one often includes feeling haunted by a fear that our beloved died without truly knowing how much we loved them. And as a result, we often to focus on all the things we wish we’d said and done better while they were still with us. We often long for just one more chance to say “I love you” — as Paul probably had with Linda, but didn’t have with John. And because grief distorts memory, we often think we didn’t do things that we actually did just fine.
Given everything we’ve talked about in Part One relative to John and Paul’s shared history, this seems a needless worry on Paul’s part, but it’s also a very human one. But that kind of longing and regret doesn’t mean those words were never said, or that the love wasn’t mutually understood to be there. And it certainly doesn’t mean that love wasn’t acted on. Only that we’re afraid that we didn’t communicate it well enough or say it often enough or in the right ways.
There’s more to notice here, too.
As we talked about several times throughout Part One, Paul is quite careful in saying that what he regrets is that he “couldn’t” tell John he loved him, rather that he didn’t. And that’s an important difference.
Much of Paul and John’s relationship took place during a time when same sex love was illegal in the US and the UK. And even after it was decriminalized in 1967 in the UK and state-by-state in the US beginning in 1962, the overwhelming mainstream public attitude towards same sex love was still that it was a psychological disorder that required psychiatric treatment.
We’ve already talked a bit in Part One about how it seems likely that what John wanted most in the world was to be able to love and be loved by Paul openly, rather than in secret. And Paul’s regret relative to not having been able to tell John he loved him might also relate to those cultural prejudices that made it difficult and even impossible for him to give John what he (and perhaps both of them) most wanted in that “better world” Paul wrote about in his 1981 song “Tug of War” — a world where they could “stand on top of the mountain with our flag unfurled.”
December 8, 1980, stole the most direct and important chance for Paul and John to do that. But even today, it’s not too late to give Paul the chance to love John openly. As we talked about at length in episode 1:9, acknowledging the credibility of the lovers possibility matters because it fully restores Paul’s right to tell his story (if there is a story to tell), and it restores Paul’s right to express his love for John for the romantic/erotic love for what it might more truly have been. And the best way to help restore that right and give John what he wanted most in the world is to counter the distorted narrative and spread the word about the credibility of the lovers possibility.
I’ll continue to answer questions here, and I’m happy for this to turn into an ongoing Q&A, so feel free to send questions to Robyn. They won’t all get this long of an answer, but I’ll do my best. Please try to send questions only after having listened to or read Beautiful Possibility in its entirety. You’ll probably find many of your questions answered in Part One, and that saves me having to repeat answers, which means that Part Two gets written more quickly.
In other news, thank you to those of you who have reached out and offered to help with researching Beautiful Possibility. If you’d like to help, please feel free to email Robyn about that as well.
Thank you to all of you who are sharing Beautiful Possibility — that matters so much to healing this story.
PS — I really need to get some kind of confirmation on whether Dot’s pregnancy was in the spring of 1960 or 1961. Sources conflict, probably because memory is fuzzy. If anyone has info to share or wants to track that down, I’d be most grateful.
FOOTNOTES:
(1) We already talked extensively in Part One about the more complex masculinity that The Beatles role modeled as part of sparking the Love Revolution — they were in most ways not in any meaningful way “Northern men,” aka men who adopted traditional “hard” masculinity. And we’ll talk more about that in Part Two.
(2) Paul McCartney, interview with Bernard Goldberg for 48 Hours (January 1990) —
Q: One of the new songs, “This One”, is it about a marriage?
Paul: A relationship. Yeah.
Q: And about, not expressing emotions and feelings?
Paul: You get those moments, late at night or when you’re feeling good and you think: “I hope I tell her I love her, enough”. And then come the morning, when you’ve got to get off to the office and it’s [brusquely] “Love you, goodbye!”, and so on. Life’s like that, there’s never enough time to tell them, like your parents for instance, oh god just what you meant to me. You always think, “I’m saving it up. I’ll tell ‘em one day”. Something like John, for instance. He died.
I was lucky, the last few weeks, months that he was alive, we’d managed to get our relationship back on track. And we were talking and having really good conversations. But George actually didn't get his relationship right. They were arguing right up to the end. Which I’m sure is a source of great sadness to him. And I’m sure, in the feeling of this song, George was always planning to tell John he loved him. But time ran out. And that’s what the song is about. There never could be a better moment than this one, right now. Take this moment to say, “I love you”."
(NOTE Paul’s initial “yeah,” confirming, yes, marriage, and then also correcting/equating “marriage” to “relationship” and then using “relationship” relative to John in his follow-up answer — thus in the way of a master wordsmith practiced at sharing his innermost thoughts only indirectly, Paul seems to be implictly telling us “This One” is indeed about his relationshp with John.
There are other reasons that also point to “This One” being a song about John.
There’s the obvious theme of regret/difficulty expressing love that Paul talks about in the quote above, and which seems to be a “tell” in Paul’s songs that he’s writing about John.
Then there’s the official video — or rather, one of the two official videos — which has an Indian theme and features images and iconography that reference their trip to the ashram in 1968. (We'll talk more about why references to India point strongly to John when we get there in the story.)
There’s also the McCartney-esque wordplay of “this one” and “this swan”—
The swan is gliding above the ocean
A god is riding upon his back
How calm the water and bright the rainbow
Fade this swan to black
Birds, of course, feature prominently throughout Paul’s songwriting. And while I'm not by no means an expert in bird mating behaviour, most of us know that swans famously mate for life. And more than that, notice the final line of the “swan” verse, in which the swan “fades to black,” indicating separation by death, leaving the surviving swan to grief and remember and regret (and yes, the rainbow reference, too, which, if I have the history right, became a symbol for same sex love in the late ‘70s).
The reference to a god might refer to a meditation experience in India or a bit of symbolic mythological lore that they picked up while there. Or the “god” reference might refer back to Paul’s story of the first time he and John tripped together and spent the night at Cavendish staring into each other’s eyes. Paul has shared that during that acid trip, he saw John as the emperor of the universe — which is, essentially, seeing John as God. (There is more we could say about the “swan” verse relative to that possibility, but it crosses into the private details of their possible love affair, so I’ll leave you to notice that on your own.)
And then there’s the bridge —
What opportunities did we allow to flow by
Feeling like the timing wasn't quite right?
What kind of magic might have worked if we had stayed calm?
Couldn't I have given you a better life?
— which seems fairly clearly to reference, once again, regret, but also the turbulent emotions and many impulsive/ill-considered choices by both of them during the breakup. And also, perhaps, Paul’s regret at not having been able to offer John the public commitment that John seems to have longed for (as we’ll get to in future parts of Beautiful Possibility).
Finally, I should mention that there is an interpretation of “This One” (particularly given the India-themed video and the “swan” verse) that suggests that “what happened in India” is that John and Paul acted for the first time on their mutual love for one another, and that’s what broke them up, and thus by extension, what broke the band up.
This is a somewhat credible interpretation (though only somewhat, given that Paul is asking for reassurance, rather than saying that he never did these things). And that interpretation is supported by some of the research, including most notably the “microphone conversation” in Get Back that we talked about briefly in episode 1:9. So that their love was acted on for the first and/or only timein India is certainly possible, but as we explored at length in Part One and will continue to explore in parts two and three, the overall body of research doesn’t seem to support that theory.
We’ll get to all of that — respectfully and without detail — in future parts of Beautiful Possibility.
5-29-25
Hi all, I’m back from the monestary (which yes, was a literal thing and not a metaphor), and I’ll probably talk on The Red Abbess about how spending four days with only the company of my own thoughts as a way to decompress was perhaps not the bestest idea I’ve ever had…. For here, I’m posting the list of specific research I’m currently in search of, in case anyone either wants to lend a hand searching, or simply has any of these to hand already—
In Search of...
I’m looking for the original, primary sources for these quotes — meaning not quoted/referenced by a second source, but the original interview in which they were said. If anyone has them, I’d be deeply grateful if you’d email them to Robyn.
primary source of Chris Salewicz’s mention in his bio of Paul: “In later years John would admit that Paul had been the first love of his life, and Yoko the second.” (I’m guessing this is something John said to Harry Nilsson)
Confirmation on the year of Dot’s pregnancy. 60 or 61? Sources conflict and it’s important.
John once said something like (not verbatim): I write the way I write because of Paul, and he writes the way he writes because of me.
John re: “In My Life” (or “If I Fell”) that includes something like "written for someone I was in love with at the time." (not the version in Sheff)
John: Paul and I know each other on a lot of levels very few people know about. (not the reference in the Sheff interview)
Brian Epstein: I have the mentality of a teenage girl. (this one is ubiquitous, yet somehow I’ve lost it...)
George Martin: “It was like a tug of war. Imagine two people pulling on a rope smiling at each other and pulling all the time with all their might. The tension between the two of them made for the bond.” This is also ubiquitous, but it’s always quoted from someone who’s quoting it from someone.
There's a quote by Denny Laine about how everyone in the music industry knew that Wings was Paul's backup band, it was only the public that thought it was a "band" per se.
Cynthia Lennon: “John never looked at anyone like he looked at Paul.”
Yoko Ono: “I thought John was cheating on me with Paul” or “I was always worried that John was cheating on me with Paul.”
There’s a quote in which Paul says he gave Linda songwriting credit early on because she was being helpful and he thought that was worth a credit.
Any references at all, no matter how trivial, to any combination of the four of them being in contact — or more specifically, togetherin person — during the '70s (and especially John and Paul)
Any references at all to any trips John and Paul may have taken to either Scotland or Ireland during the ‘60s (other than the ‘64 tour stop).
5-19-25
The audio gremlins in episode 1:7 have, I think, finally been fully resolved. More importantly, the last ten minutes have been rewritten. The original ending was both wildly overwritten and also not as clear as it needed to be about the effect of the distorted narrative on our world. I think it’s a lot better now, so if episode 1:7 didn’t land for you the first time, maybe give it another go.
Thank you for your patience while I learn how to do all of this for the first time.
