A Look At Bob Marley's Complex Relationship With His Wife

Publish date: 2024-05-06

According to The Voice, Rita spoke in a 2012 documentary, "Marley," about Bob's life and early death at 36 from cancer in 1981. "When we first met, it was in poverty and pain. There was no showmanship behind it or any superstardom. It was just two ghetto people falling in love naturally, out of God's grace," she said. "And we knew what true love felt like throughout the good and bad we shared."

Rita told BBC Caribbean that though Bob's infidelities hurt, "As they say you grunt and bear it. That's what I had to do because I was so in love with this man and love grew stronger, it's not that it grew weaker."

However, she also admitted in her book, "No Woman, No Cry: My Life with Bob Marley," that sometimes she would turn him down when he wanted sex because she knew he was having unsafe sex with other partners, per BBC Caribbean. Alternately, Rita said in "Marley" that Bob's own jealousies about her and other men "gave me an assurance that he really did deeply, dearly love me," The Voice reported. 

As time went on in the relationship, Rita evolved into new roles she felt Bob needed in his life. "So I reached a point where I became like his sister, his mother and his guardian angel. I felt I had a responsibility to him. That this was why God put us together," she said in "Marley," per The Voice. 

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