Parenting & Family Quote by Linda McCartney

There is a quiet comic snap to Linda McCartney framing conventional upbringing as the reason she and her partner could not do the most conventional-sounding thing: “live together permanently.” The line pivots on “the whole thing,” a dismissive little bundle of marriage, kids, and domestic script-making that she both recognizes and refuses to romanticize. It suggests a generational hangover: even for people who grew up inside the default model, that model can feel like a costume you’re expected to keep wearing, not a life you freely choose.

Her phrasing is also a soft act of boundary-setting. “We were not the kind of people” isn’t a manifesto; it’s a social alibi. McCartney was married to one of the most scrutinized men on the planet, and her public life was an ongoing negotiation between private intention and public projection. In that context, “permanently” does extra work: it nods to how celebrity relationships are asked to perform permanence as proof of legitimacy, and how suffocating that can feel when every domestic detail becomes content.

Coming from a photographer, the subtext lands even harder. Photographers live by frames: what gets included, what’s cropped out, what looks like truth at first glance. McCartney is pointing at the gap between the picture of stability and the lived reality of it. The intent isn’t to reject commitment; it’s to reject a single, inherited template for commitment. The wit is that tradition, for her, functions less like a blueprint than like a warning label.