Di and I - A Royal Wedding Story

When Diana married Prince Charles 30 years ago, I couldn’t be bothered watching the royal wedding. Preoccupied with my (unhappy) love life, financially insolvent, divorced from any sense of direction vis-à-vis my own life, the very notion of a “Princess Diana” was an irritant and an affront to me. Little girls wanted to be princesses; grown women wanted to go mano a mano with life itself & were seekers of sterner satisfactions. Plus there was the revolutionary feminist angle to consider as well. Enlightened women all over the world were striding forward in search of fulfilling careers, while Diana was striding ahead towards…marriage to a very wealthy older man she barely knew. How uncool was that? She seemed pathetically out of step with the times, this blushingly ornamental 19-year old nursery school teacher, with her big hats and little white gloves and demure downward glances. I myself hadn’t donned little white gloves or a hat since the age of 11, and while admittedly I myself hadn’t exactly laid much groundwork in terms of a future career - preferring instead to devote myself to a steady diet of fiction reading, complaining about my boyfriend’s lack of motivation, and discussing the relative merits of Zigzag versus Bambu rolling papers with my friends – I knew success lay ahead, just waiting for me to get my act together and claim it. Didn’t Diana know the times they were a-changing? And what was up with the humiliating public virginity test? Even more humiliatingly, she actually passed it. Please. She was SO not me.

But then…life started doling out the hits, like it always does. Diana started demonstrating all sorts of unfortunate self-control/impulse-control problems. Hey, me too! She made terrible romantic choices. So did I! She was stuck for years in a bad marriage. Weird, that happened to me as well. She was an escapist shopaholic, a partier, a woman who fiddled while Rome burned. Me too again. She had body image issues. Understandable, so did I. She felt hopelessly trapped by circumstances from which she believed she couldn’t escape. As did I, for more years than I care to admit. Then she got divorced. Guess what? Me too - although I actually had her beat there, I got divorced twice. The similarities continued to multiply, trumpeted by tabloid headlines around the globe. I no longer regarded her as a vapid twit; instead, she began to take on the personna of some kind of weird doppelganger, an avatar bent on conquering my own difficulties. Diana – like me -fell over and over again, but the thing I admired about her was that whenever she fell, she got right back up. Irespected that. Even more to the point, she was a survivor. Until of course, she wasn’t. But that tunnel waits for us all in the end, n’est pas? In that too I will resemble her.

In any case, the longer Diana was out there as a public figure, the more she began to seem like Everywoman, not just for me but for the women of my generation. Most of us spent a large portion of our formative years in a world dominated by the concepts of “ladies”, “wives & mothers”, of taffeta petticoats & little white gloves & dreams of being princesses, a world that pretty much stopped existing right around 1968 or so. There was this inchoate sense of disconnect between the bedrock assumptions & expectations that had been instilled in us as girl children and the new social realities & roles that had come into being when we were teenagers, and which we were now expected to assume as adults. Left to my own devices, I couldn’t make the two parts join up, no matter how hard I tried. Diana taught me how by articulating that struggle on a world stage. The only way out is through. It’s a very helpful lesson to learn.

So. Fast forward to now. Another royal marriage is on the horizon, but this time my attitude’s changed. Its time for a new princess, and I think Kate will make a good one. I've come to understand that women need princesses even if they don’t believe in them, need them to watch and to criticize and to love and to learn from. Will I watch Prince William’s wedding? You bet. After all, I grew up with his mother. In fact, she showed me how.