Simply Red - Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye

"Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" is a song with both lyrics and music by Cole Porter.

In 1918, Porter met Linda, a rich, Louisville, Kentucky-born divorcée eight years his senior. She was beautiful and well-connected socially; the couple shared mutual interests, including a love of travel, and she became Porter's confidant and companion. The couple married the following year.

She was in no doubt about Porter's homosexuality, but for Linda, it offered continued social status and a partner who was the antithesis of her abusive first husband. For Porter, it brought a respectable heterosexual front in an era when homosexuality was not publicly acknowledged.

There was only one period of their marriage where things started to unravel and that was when he started to indulge in far too open engagements with other men, which threatened their social acceptance in the heterosexual community and thus threatened their happiness.  There have been suggestions that the song ‘every time we say goodbye’ is about this time, as Linda often simply walked out when things became too rough.

From - Gay Influence [Gay & Bisexual Men of Importance]

Porter was not discrete. A recent biography recounts that in his later years, Cole kept "breaking appliances so he could lure cute repairmen into his lair". …... All of Porter's sexual activity was homosexual, and he became more brazen in the more open and permissive atmosphere of Hollywood. Linda reacted by staying away from California, sailing back and forth between her residences in Paris and New York.

Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye

Every time we say goodbye I die a little
Every time we say goodbye I wonder why a little
Why the gods above me who must be in the know
Think so little of me they allow you to go

When you're near there's such an air of spring about it
I can hear a lark somewhere waiting to sing about it
There's no love song finer
But how strange the change from major to minor
Every time we say goodbye

When you're near there's such an air of spring about it
I can hear a lark somewhere waiting to sing about it
There's no love song finer
But how strange the change from major to minor
Every time we say goodbye