Yahoo Sports The Sussexes will not divorce: their marriage is their power
The Sussexes’ marriage has become the subject of a commentariat sweepstake. Over the weekend, Princess Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell was the latest to wager that the couple are heading for their personal Gotterdammerung and that Harry will return, as inevitable as the asp at Cleopatra’s breast, to the shores of his motherland.
It is an increasingly prevalent view, but one I hold no truck with. Harry and Meghan may be one-trick ponies but I doubt they will ever consciously uncouple. Consider the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, whose own marriage was not expected to last. Whenever they were apart, people who met them noticed that this apartness diminished rather than enhanced them. They did not stand up singly as they did as a couple. According to friends of mine in LA who know Harry and Meghan socially, their dependence on each other is similar and due seemingly to some inner lack in themselves.
With all his princely social perfection, there is a boring blandness of personality about Harry that makes him less interesting alone than as a partner to the streetwise firebrand he has married. When Meghan goes her own way, she can be jarring. As was once said of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, ”He gives her class, and she gives him sex appeal.”
Together, the Sussexes are a phenomenon, inescapably visible, if increasingly hard to explain. What forces combined to produce them in the first place and how have they managed to hold out so long against the blasts of disheartening misunderstanding and misrepresentation? There is something almost heroic in the way they have held their perilous ground, disdaining all compromise, unmoved by their vociferous critics. They have faced every conceivable form of attack that rational people are capable of mounting and yet they have scarcely budged an inch.
Even when their “nearly catastrophic” two-hour car chase was shown to be as questionable as a £30 note, it failed to move them. They still plod along in the cheerless and laborious way they first marked out for themselves and are as undaunted by legal rulings as they are by abuse. If anything, they are more unyielding than ever and their fearless standard bearer, Omid Scobie, has earned a reluctant and resigned sort of testimony, though I am concerned that the evolution of his eyebrows is beginning to mirror that of Joan Crawford’s.
No one quite believes in other people’s marriages. There is always a flavour of doubt, a feeling half instinctive and half logical that one party is taking the other for a ride, and therefore must have something nefarious up their sleeve. Male commentators tend to take this view more than women. They fail to understand that members of my sex enter into marriages, or any relationship, expecting very little in the way of fairytales and to most women marriage is a daily transaction.
The Sussexes’ marriage is expedient, and expedience has held more relationships together than that crazy thing called love, which, as Thomas Hardy, a man who did understand women, once wrote, is as evanescent as steam.