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Stevie Nicks has seen a lot of action, and not just in the music industry. Nicks’ love life is just as high profile as her music career. She’s had a few publicized relationships over the years, including one of her biggest with her Fleetwood Mac bandmate, Lindsey Buckingham.

There have also been smaller affairs with friends like Dave Stewart and Jimmy Iovine, as well as a bigger, more disastrous one with her other Fleetwood Mac bandmate, Mick Fleetwood. Nicks has only been married once, for only three months, to the widow of her best friend. However, out of all these men, Nicks says only Joe Walsh is her greatest love.

Still, Nicks has never remarried. It’s hard finding Mr. Stevie Nicks. There are a lot of requirements. However, while she’s waited for him, Nicks has sorted every single man that’s ever passed through her life into two categories.

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham during a Fleetwood Mac press conference in 1979.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham | Ebet Roberts/Getty Images

Stevie Nicks can sort all the men in her life into 2 categories

It’s hard to forget the love life that Nicks has had over the years, but think about what she must be feeling. During an interview with MacLean’s, Nicks said that virtually every man in her life hardly “understood” her. That’s why she’s never married (does her three-month marriage to Kim Anderson even count?).

Nicks continued to say that she could split all the men in her life into two categories. One for her great loves, who tragically didn’t understand her or were jealous of her. A second for those who weren’t resentful and completely trusted her but couldn’t be with her, mostly because of her line of work.

“If I look back over all the men in my life, there’s the first category: those are the great loves,” Nicks explained. “They didn’t understand. Even if they were in the business, they were jealous and they were resentful and had a hard time with my life and they didn’t like all my friends. They didn’t like the fact that the witches of the canyon were around all the time.

“The next category were men who really liked me, guys who trusted me—they were not the least bit resentful of what I did when I was on tour. They would say, ‘Bye, keep in touch, have a good time, be great on stage and maybe I’ll fly out and see you some weekend,’ but we didn’t connect in other ways because my life, my career, just got bigger.”

No one could keep up with Nicks

Unfortunately, none of the men could keep up with Nicks, whether they were in category one or two. How could they when Nicks had two fully-fledged music careers as a solo artist and as Fleetwood Mac’s loyal frontwoman? Nicks had too much going on to focus on a new man, unfortunately.

“Guess what: I had two full-on careers going! [My solo record] Bella Donna took three months to [record]—which was not very long,” Nicks continued to explain. “When it was put out, it went to No. 1. I did a very short six-week tour for it and then went straight back to Fleetwood Mac. My [close] friend Robin had leukemia and was dying all the way through the making of Bella Donna.”

Yet, Nicks says she didn’t have very many one-night stands. Her album 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault, comprised of old demos recorded between 1969 and 1987 and two songs from 1994 and 1995, has nothing but songs about her “great loves.”

“Those are the glory songs,” Nicks said. “I couldn’t write that album today. None of those songs were written after a one-night stand because there weren’t very many of those in my life. Those are all about relationships that lasted. All my relationships lasted.”

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Nicks’ career is always in the way of her love life

Nicks told the Guardian that it was easy finding love in the early days of her career. “In ’75, ’76, we were beautiful, fast, sexy, love was everywhere and we were moving from person to person. That’s it. Love was around every corner,” she said.

However, she quickly learned that her career was actually a hindrance to her love life. “I find it nearly impossible,” Nicks told High Times in 1982. “Anyone that you meet is going to be in some way in the business. I don’t meet people who aren’t in the business. I don’t go anywhere to meet them. What am I going to do, sit in a bar?

“At some point or another, my job gets to them. It’s easy to understand,” Nicks continued. “‘No, I can’t have dinner, I have interviews.’ ‘But we were in New York all week and we didn’t get to have dinner once.’ ‘I’m sorry, what do you want me to do, call everybody and cancel?'”

After a while, it “slowly that creeps into their head, that you are not making the time for them, but you make the time for everyone else,” Nicks concluded.

At the end of the day, though, Nicks continued to the Guardian, she made these decisions, not to put the men in her life first, not to get married, and not to have children because she wanted her two music careers more than anything else. “I want to always be free to follow my art wherever it takes me,” she said.

Still, some would have liked to see a little Stevie Nicks following in her mother’s footsteps. But it just wasn’t written on the cards for Nicks. We appreciate her music much more, knowing everything she gave up in the process.