Yoko Ono Said John Lennon ‘Just Gets in the Way’ Shortly Before She Left Him 

While John Lennon and Yoko Ono remained married until his death, but they separated just a few years after their wedding. The couple spent 18 months apart during Lennon’s “lost weekend.” Shortly before their separation, Ono said she was tiring of Lennon’s constant presence in her life. 

Yoko Ono said John Lennon was getting in her way

In the 1970s, Lennon and Ono were close friends with radio personality Elliot Mintz. Though he lived across the country from them, they called him at all hours to talk about their relationship. In 1973, Ono expressed serious concerns about the relationship.

“John and I are not getting along very well,” she told Mintz, per his book We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me. “You know that, don’t you, Elliot?”

When Mintz asked if he could help, Ono said there was nothing anyone could do.

“What could you possibly do to help?” she asked. “John has become a distraction to my work. He doesn’t understand all that I do. He just gets in the way. It gets very tiring. Sometimes I just need to be alone.”

In a separate call, Lennon complained that he wasn’t spending enough time with his wife.

“I never get to be with her anymore,” he told Mintz. “The other day I shaved and got dressed up and told her I wanted to take her to her favorite restaurant. And she turned me down. She said she didn’t have time. Me own f***ing wife said that to me!”

Yoko Ono shared how she told John Lennon they needed time apart

Finally, Ono reached her breaking point. She told Lennon that she needed time away from him.

“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?’”

She sent him to Los Angeles with the couple’s assistant, May Pang, and the pair became romantically involved. By 1975, however, he returned home to Ono.

He struggled without her

Mintz picked up Lennon and Pang at the airport. He immediately realized Lennon would have a hard time on his own.

“John was functionally a child when it came to taking care of himself,” Mintz wrote. “This wasn’t his fault: he’d been a rock star since he was a teenager. His every want had been arranged for him virtually his entire adult life. He never learned to do his own grocery shopping, never paid a  utility bill or mailed a package or involved himself in any of the myriad mundane tasks the rest of us spend so much of our daily lives mired in.”

Lennon spent his time in LA in nightclubs, staying out late into the night and drinking heavily.