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Paul and Linda McCartney were married for nearly 30 years. They had a close, loving relationship before her death in 1998. Paul said he gave Linda a gift inspired by Jackie Kennedy Onassis. He felt like he had the better version of the gift.

Paul McCartney said he gave Linda McCartney a bracelet

Paul and Linda married in 1969. During their nearly 30-year marriage, Paul said he took note of a gift Aristotle Onassis gave to his wives.

“I’d seen Aristotle Onassis gave his wives a bracelet,” Paul said on an episode of Chicken Shop Date. “And so one of them was Jackie Onassis, and so it [spelled out] J-I-L-Y: ‘Jackie, I love you.'”

He said he decided to get one for Linda, and thought that she had the perfect name for the bracelet.

“And so I suddenly thought, ‘Perfect!’ Get Linda one and it’ll be L-I-L-Y, ‘Linda, I love you,'” he said. “Lily. It’s the perfect name to do that with.”

Paul and Linda McCartney spent only ten days apart during their entire marriage

In nearly three decades of marriage, Paul said that he and Linda only spent ten days apart. This was only because he’d been arrested for marijuana, and spent a period of time in jail.

“I am privileged to have been her lover for thirty years, and in all that time, except for one enforced absence, we never spent a single night apart,” he said, per the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “When people asked why, we would say, ‘What for?’”

She died of breast cancer in 1998.

He said she saved him after The Beatles broke up

Paul and Linda married shortly before The Beatles broke up. He admitted that the breakup wore heavily on him in their early years of marriage.

“The Beatles had been my whole life, really,” he said in the documentary Man on the Run. “When we split up, I thought I’ll never write another note of music ever. I had fear of being a grown-up.”

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He said he was lucky to have Linda at this time.

“I felt very depressed. I thought, ‘I’ll have a wee dram of scotch. Why not? I might have another one. I’ve got nowhere to go,’” he said. “This lasted a couple of months. I got into drinking too much. But I was very lucky, because I had Linda.”

He recalled something she told him whenever he got overly frustrated with his career.

“In a situation like that you lost your job, you can get uptight very easily,” he said. “One of my favorite expressions of hers was, you’d be saying, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’d love to do so and so, but I can’t. I can’t,’ and she’d say, ‘It’s allowed.’”

Paul said that this phrase was how he managed to move forward during this time.

“It’s like all the weight just went off. It’s allowed. Yeah, of course it is,” he said. “So those kind of things really impressed me and I think probably made me think a lot more was allowed than was.”

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