Sonny and Cher’s First Meeting Wasn’t Love at First Sight (For One of Them, Anyway)

Sonny and Cher are easily one of the most iconic partnerships in music and romance, but according to the latter artist, the feelings of attraction and admiration were largely one-sided at first. The couple first met in 1962. But they wouldn’t officially marry until 1969 (we won’t count their fake TV wedding in 1964).

Cher thought that Sonny was the most interesting man she had ever seen. But Sonny’s feelings toward Cher were less passionate. But to be fair, he was married (albeit separated), and she was a teenager.

Sonny and Cher’s First Meeting

In a November 2024 interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Cher recalled the first time she saw Sonny Bono in a coffee shop in 1962. Ever the fashion-minded artist, a still-teenage Cher remembered what the 27-year-old was wearing down to his footwear: a mohair suit, mustard shirt with a white collar, and black Beatle boots. (But since this was pre-Beatlemania, they were known as Cubans.)

“I thought it was like when Tony met Maria,” Cher recalled, referencing the meeting of the romantic leads in West Side Story. “I mean, everybody disappeared. It was just the two of us. But he didn’t like me. It wasn’t love at first sight. It was something. I never felt it before.”

Around the same time, Cher’s roommates kicked her out of their home. Bono, who had just moved into an apartment nearby, offered her a place to stay if she cleaned the apartment. Cher obliged, half out of a refusal to return to her parents’ home and half because she thought Bono might be making a move.

Bono made sure to clear the air. “He went, ‘No, no, I don’t find you particularly attractive,’” Cher remembered. “So, I was upset and happy at the same time.”

An Interesting and Dynamic Partnership

After Sonny Bono and Cher became roommates, they soon began their musical partnership that would create genre-defining hits like “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On.” The romance came later, although Cher clarified in a 1975 interview that it wasn’t necessarily a passionate transition into their marriage.

“It wasn’t a fiery, sexy thing with us,” Cher said (via Biography), “but rather paternal. We were bound together, two people who needed each other, almost for protection.” Even Cher’s mother noticed the similarities between her daughter’s new romantic and musical partner and her father, Johnny Sarkisian.

“Sonny was the spitting image of her father,” she explained. “I think the father image had a great deal to do with Cher’s feelings, but I didn’t think it would have helped if I’d told that to Cher. When a girl is as much in love with a man as she was, not much can be done about it.”

Infidelity and the stress of their careers began taking a toll on the relationship, and the couple eventually divorced in 1975. Days later, Cher married Gregg Allman. That tumultuous relationship would last until 1979. Bono married Susie Coelho in 1981, and they divorced three years later. One-half of the iconic Sonny and Cher duo died in 1998 in a skiing accident.

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