"We were playing hard to get"
What about the time we met?
Well, I suppose that you could say that we were playing hard to get
Didn't understand a thing
But we could always sing
I feel like there’s not enough discussion of this verse as a whole. On the surface, the “playing hard to get” line might seem like a simple reference to whole "pretending not to care" attitude they both had at the begining, like when John sent Pete Shotton to ask Paul if he wanted to join the band (instead of asking him directly), and Paul weighing the offer with a cautious “I’ll think about it.” I'm pretty sure that’s what Paul might say if someone asked him about that line. But it’s clearly deeper than that. The line that comes after, “we didn’t understand a thing” suggests there was something more going on that they couldn’t articulate at the time. So music became their love language, ("but we could always sing"), the way they expressed emotions they couldn’t (or were afraid to) name.
Something special between us
When we made love the game was over
I couldn't say the words
Words wouldn't get my feelings through
I see this verse from However Absurd as the more unfiltered version of that same theme expressed in Here Today. It explores a similar tension: a “game,” a "playing hard to get" dynamic, which ended once actual intimacy began, all while the difficulty of fully communicating these feelings lingered. And maybe this continued until that night in Key West, when, as Paul said, ‘there wasn't any reason to keep it all inside’; they finally gave a verbal release to the love they had previously expressed only through songs (which is why we really need to pay attention to the love songs they wrote before mid 1964, like Just Fun, If I Fell, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, etc.), even if they had already been physically intimate before.
"We got drunk and started to get kind of emotional, you know, ‘Oh, you were great when you –– I love that.’ We started [and] it all came out. On the way to that, there was a lot of soul-searching. We told each other a few truths. ‘Well, I love you. I love you, man. I love that you said that. I love you.’ And we opened up."
I’ve always loved these two pictures, especially since they were taken just a few days after the “night we cried.” You can’t help but feel that if they had actually been alone in that room, Paul would have put his hands around John’s waist lol
