More than four decades after Carly Simon and James Taylor ended their marriage, Simon is still exploring what that relationship meant — and whether love can ever be described as simply as being present or absent.

On her new studio album, Come in Waves, the 83-year-old singer-songwriter turns toward memories of marriage, separation and family with striking openness. One song in particular, “Maybe I Never Loved You,” appears to revisit the complicated emotional history she shares with Taylor, now 78.

Rather than presenting their past as a straightforward romance that failed, Simon moves between contradictory feelings. The song questions whether the love she once believed in was real, while also suggesting that some part of it may never have disappeared.

That uncertainty becomes the heart of the track.

A Marriage That Became Part of Music History

Simon and Taylor were two major singer-songwriters of their generation when their lives became intertwined.

They married in 1972 and remained together until 1983. During their marriage, they welcomed two children, daughter Sally and son Ben, who are now 52 and 49.

Those basic facts — a marriage, children and eventually a divorce — become emotional evidence in Simon’s new song.

At one point, she wonders whether she ever truly loved the person she is addressing, then points toward the life they built together. She sings that they married and had a child, adding simply that it “counts for something.”

The thought captures the unusual tension running through the song.

Simon does not appear interested in rewriting the relationship as entirely wonderful or entirely painful. Instead, she acknowledges how difficult it can be to understand a bond years after it has ended.

Was it love? Was it something mistaken for love? Can a relationship be over while the feeling attached to it continues?

Her lyrics leave those questions deliberately unsettled.

‘Maybe I Never Loved You’ Refuses a Simple Answer

The emotional power of the song comes from Simon’s willingness to contradict herself.

She considers whether she never loved the person at all. Then she allows for the opposite possibility. She also questions whether she was loved in return, despite having once been told that she was.

By the end, the contradiction becomes even more pronounced.

Simon suggests that perhaps the past should finally be buried — but ultimately leaves listeners with the possibility that her feelings could remain forever.

For anyone familiar with what Simon has previously said about Taylor, that emotional conflict has a long history.

The former couple have not maintained a close relationship since their divorce. In 2015, while discussing her memoir Boys in the Trees, Simon revealed that she and Taylor were not speaking.

Yet the absence of communication did not mean the absence of affection.

At the time, Simon described still wanting to help and heal him and said plainly that she continued to love him. She also spoke about the pain of remaining deeply loyal to someone while feeling that the same care was not being returned.

Writing her memoir eventually led her toward a difficult realization: love did not necessarily have to be mutual for her own feelings to exist.

Why she and Taylor no longer spoke remained something Simon herself said she could not fully explain.

More than a decade later, “Maybe I Never Loved You” seems to return to that same unresolved territory.

The New Album Also Looks at Their Children

Taylor is not the only member of that chapter of Simon’s life who appears to influence the deeply personal material on Come in Waves.

Another song, “Mother of Pearl,” directly addresses Simon and Taylor’s daughter Sally and looks back at what divorce meant for their children.

Simon imagines Sally at age 7, living through the breakup of her parents’ marriage, and reflects on the reality that children have no control over such decisions.

She also references Ben while recalling how both children were caught within the emotional noise surrounding the separation.

That perspective gives the album’s reflections on divorce another dimension.

“Maybe I Never Loved You” focuses on the uncertainty between two former partners. “Mother of Pearl,” meanwhile, turns toward what happened around them — specifically, how the choices of two adults became part of their children’s childhood.

Together, the songs suggest Simon is looking back not only at whom she loved, but at the family created by that love and the consequences of its breakdown.

A Personal Return After More Than 18 Years

The deeply reflective material arrives as Simon makes a significant musical return.

Come in Waves, released earlier this month, is her first studio album in more than 18 years.

That long gap makes the personal nature of the new songs especially notable.

Simon has spent decades writing about attraction, vulnerability, heartbreak and the complicated ways people remember one another. But the new material finds her revisiting one of the defining relationships of her own life from the perspective of someone who has had decades to reconsider it.

Time has not necessarily provided a clean answer.

Instead, the distance seems to have made room for contradictions.

A marriage can end and still matter. Two people can stop speaking and remain emotionally connected in memory. Someone can question whether love was ever real while simultaneously wondering if that same love will ever completely disappear.

For Simon, the story she tells through these songs is also larger than the marriage itself. Sally and Ben remain permanent connections between two people whose romantic relationship ended more than 40 years ago.

That may be why “Maybe I Never Loved You” does not resolve itself neatly.

The song’s central question ultimately seems less important than everything surrounding it: the marriage happened, a family was created, the relationship ended, and the feelings left behind proved far more difficult to erase.

After all these years, Simon appears willing to live with that ambiguity.

She may question what the love between them truly was. But in returning to it through music after decades of distance, she makes one thing clear: whatever happened between Carly Simon and James Taylor still occupies a complicated place in her emotional history — one that cannot easily be reduced to either love or its absence.