Check Yourself at the Door
Though Meghan had far more life experience—in employment, romantic history and personal pursuits, as well as actual years lived—when she married Harry than Diana did when she tied the knot at 20, each faced the same expectation.
“The day I walked down the aisle at St. Paul’s Cathedral, I felt that my personality was taken away from me, and I was taken over by the royal machine,” Diana told a journalist, per Sally Bedell Smith‘s Diana in Search of Herself.
On CBS This Morning March 8 to discuss the bombshells in the previous night’s broadcast, Oprah told Gayle King of Meghan, “She said she had been told, been given advice…that it would be best if she could be ’50 percent less’ than she was. That was the quote. I remember hearing that in 2018 and said specifically to her, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to survive being half of yourself.'”
Meghan said in the interview, “Can you imagine how little sense that makes? I left my career, my life—I left everything because I love him, right? And our plan was to do this forever. Our plan, for me—I mean, I wrote letters to his family when I got there saying, ‘I’m dedicated to this. I’m here for you. Use me as you’d like.”
She talked about how, when the media frenzy was in particularly high gear, she was asked to stay home, out of the so-called spotlight, which meant no lunch with friends, no casual outings, nothing—when she hadn’t even been going anywhere on her own anyway.
As Diana told Bashir, 25 years ago, “There’s no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it.”
