WHY HARRY AND MEGHAN WILL BE THE BEST ROYAL COUPLE
Just
as Princess Diana broke down the stuffiest of royal traditions and
conventions, her younger son -- and his new fiancée -- are modernizing
the royal family all over again.
Prince
Harry's engagement to actress Meghan Markle is not the first to join a
senior member of the British royal family with an American, nor with an
American who has been married once before. The comparisons between their
engagement and that of Edward VIII, who gave up the throne so he could
marry divorced American Wallis Simpson, end there, however.
What makes this royal couple different
from any other around the British throne is the way Harry has -- with,
it seems, the positive influence of Meghan -- broken out of the tight
constraints of royal protocol to discuss grief, mental health and to
share his searingly honest admission of not always wanting to be a
prince.
Harry and Meghan began dating 18 months ago, and so it is surely no coincidence that the prince's transformation
from someone who partied hard into a taboo-breaking royal role model
has happened over a similar period of time. The watershed moment came in
April of this year, when Harry gave an interview
to the Daily Telegraph's Bryony Gordon about his battle with mental
health problems following the death of his mother 20 years ago.
The
significance of this moment cannot be overstated: for the many people
who suffer from anxiety, depression and other mental health issues, one
of the toughest challenges can often be talking about it openly. It is
still, in our modern society of social media sharing, a taboo for many.
For a member of the royal family, whose members guard their private
lives as closely as their crown jewels, such openness was extraordinary.
By discussing the anxiety he
felt conducting royal engagements, the "total chaos" he felt even in his
late 20s as he still struggled to come to terms with the death of his
mother even after nearly two decades, Harry was changing not only the
royal family but also the way society discusses mental health.
Then, in an interview
with Newsweek in June, Harry suggested his reluctance at wanting to be a
prince. "Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or
queen?" he said. "I don't think so, but we will carry out our duties at
the right time."
Later in the summer, he spoke
with raw honesty over how he felt about the way his mother was treated
by the media and the royal family and, again, his attitude to being a
prince. In interviews he and his brother William, the Duke of Cambridge,
gave to mark the 20th anniversary of Diana's tragic death, the princes
revealed in intimate detail how they had struggled to deal with their
grief.
Harry and his brother talked about
having to put on their "prince hats" when, aged just 12 and 15, they
had to walk behind their mother's hearse with their father, uncle and
grandfather. Such honesty -- and a hint that he would often want to
remove such a hat and be a normal boy and young man -- makes the
33-year-old prince seem very unroyal and normal.
What is refreshing, too, is that -- unlike his parents -- he has fallen
in love and become engaged with little signs of interference from the
Queen or other senior members of the royal family and their courtiers.
There has been no attempt to stop him marrying a divorcée -- unlike the
constitutional crisis caused in 1936 when Edward VIII planned to marry Mrs. Simpson.
Of course, Prince Harry is not
on the throne and is unlikely ever to become king, as he is currently
fifth in line and -- with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge expecting a
baby in the spring -- about to be sixth. And society has changed in 80
years -- the British royals themselves are no longer strangers to
divorce.
For Meghan, who
has spoken of her experiences as a mixed-race woman in America, the
origins of her own feminism as a young schoolgirl growing up in Los
Angeles and Donald Trump's misogyny, is someone who has worked hard at
her career as an actress. She, too, brings a refreshing modernity to the
royal family, whose resistance to change is renowned. It is clear she
will be a role model for young women and girls in the UK and US -- but
not because they aspire to be a princess. They have in her someone to look up to who describes herself as being a proud feminist, career-focused, independent-minded and above all, a strong woman.
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