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Stevie Nicks’ success as a musician went hand in hand with romance from the very beginning. In the 1970s, she formed a duo called Buckingham Nicks with former boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham, and the pair would eventually go on to join Fleetwood Mac.
Between 1975 and 2003, Nicks and Fleetwood Mac would put out eight albums. In her subsequent solo career, she’d also be prolific, releasing eight albums of her very own between 1981 and 2014. Behind the scenes of a wildly successful musical career, Stevie had one exceptionally brief marriage, and a couple of high-profile romances with fellow musicians.
Ahead of her performance during the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, airing January 1 on ABC, here’s everything to know about the hitmaker’s marriage and romances.
Lindsey Buckingham
The 75-year-old songstress was famously linked to her bandmate Lindsey, now 74, from 1966-1977. According to the Los Angeles Times, they met as high school seniors in Palo Alto, and they both belonged to a student band called Fritz. Lindsey asked Stevie to join up, and eventually, after the band broke up, they fell into a romantic relationship. “I’m not sure we would have even become a couple if it wasn’t for us leaving that band. It kind of pushed us together,” she once said, per Stephen Davis’ biography on the singer, “Gold Dust Woman.”
They moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s and formed Buckingham Nicks, their folk-rock duo. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the incarnation that would work for them, and their success was only limited to a single album that simply didn’t perform.
In the mid-70s, fate would treat them better. The couple joined Fleetwood Mac with Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Christine McVie, and magic was made. They ultimately went their separate ways in 1977, but it wasn’t always easy to continue performing together. They sometimes “shot eye daggers at each other,” per the L.A. Times in 2020, while performing to large crowds.
Stevie once opened up about the relationship and why Lindsey saw her as different from other romantic interests. “In Lindsey’s mind, all the other women that came after me were all going after rich rock-and-roll star Lindsey,” she recalled to Rolling Stone. “Nobody was looking into the heart I had looked into. Nobody was seeing the guy before he was famous. We knew each other before. That’s what makes us unique to each other.”
The duo reunited in photos for the memorial of late bandmate Christine McVie in January of 2023.
Mick Fleetwood
On the heels of the split, Stevie embarked on a brief romance with bandmate Mick in 1978. Unfortunately, however, Mick was still married to Jenny Boyd at the time. According to Vulture, she later referred to the relationship as “The crazy accidental affair.”
She explained, “Never shoulda happened. And we knew it from the beginning … If there’s anything I learned from that relationship, it was, ‘Don’t go after other women’s husbands,’ because it never works out,” she continued. “You are never gonna be the woman if you break up a marriage. You’re just the home-wrecker.”
Don Henley
Stevie next embarked on a romance with Eagles drummer Don Henley, now 73. In 1979, Stevie became pregnant by the vocalist and drummer. Stevie admitted as much during a 2014 interview with Billboard when asked about Don’s assertion that Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 song “Sara” was written by Stevie about their unborn child.
“Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara,” she said. “But there was another woman in my life named Sara, who shortly after that became Mick’s wife, Sara Fleetwood.” According to her Wikipedia page, she terminated the pregnancy.
“My mission maybe wasn’t to be a mom and a wife; maybe my particular mission was to write songs to make moms and wives feel better,” she told ABC Downtown in 2001.
Robin Anderson
Stevie married Kim Anderson, the husband of her best friend Robin Anderson, three months after Robin Died of leukemia in 1983. Two days before Robin’s death, she’d given birth to her son with Kim, and Stevie felt she needed to raise the child.
“I went crazy, absolutely crazy when Robin died,” she divulged to Woman’s Own back in 1990. “The only thing I could think of to do was try to take the load off Kim by marrying him and helping raise their son. I think in her heart Robin knew I would go after Kim. I had known her for 20 years and him for five, and I felt this baby belonged to me almost as much as it did to them.”
However, it didn’t take long for her to realize it was the wrong thing for both of them, and they split after only three months of marriage. “I was determined to take care of [Robin’s] baby, so I said to Kim, ‘I don’t know, I guess we should just get married.’” she said of the doomed union. “And so we got married three months after she died, and it was a terrible, terrible mistake. We didn’t get married because we were in love, we got married because we were grieving and it was the only way that we could feel like we were doing anything.”
Stevie remains close to her stepson Matthew after reuniting with him during his teens, and according to Vulture, she put him through college.