The Duchess of Sussex shares how her husband pushed back on the narrative that she got lucky in their relationship.
Meghan Markle has a partner who will come to her defense! In the third episode of her Archetypes podcast, the Duchess of Sussex shares with guest Mindy Kaling how her husband, Prince Harry, reacted to the idea of people saying she was lucky to be in a relationship with him.
While chatting with The Mindy Project star about how women are sometimes convinced that a man choosing them shows their worth, the 41-year-old royal shared how she and her husband pushed back that notion.
“When I started dating my husband, when we became engaged, everyone was like, ‘Oh My god, you’re just so lucky he chose you.’ And a certain point, after you hear it a million times over, you’re like, ‘Well, I chose him too,’” Meghan shares.
“But thankfully, I have a partner who was countering that narrative for me and going, ‘They’ve got it all wrong. I'm the lucky one because you chose me.’ But it is gendered and it’s archetyped and it’s stereotyped that ‘you’re so lucky,’ and it just feeds into this idea that you’re waiting for someone to tell you that you’re good enough as opposed to knowing that you’re good enough on your own,” she adds.
Meghan tied the knot with Harry in 2018. The couple are the parents of Archie, 3, and 1-year-old Lilibet.
While the duchess appears to have always been the prettiest girl in the group, she revealed that it wasn’t until she was older that she grew out of being “the smart one.”
“I never had anyone to sit with at lunch,” she shares with Mindy.
“I was always a little bit of a loner and really shy and didn’t know where to fit in. So, I was like, ‘Well, OK, I'll just become the president of multi-culture club, and the president of sophomore class and the president of this and French club. And by doing that, I had meetings at lunch time so I didn’t have to worry about who I would sit with or what I would do because I was always so busy.”
The reveal took Mindy by surprise, as she admitted she did not feel they could relate when it came to that part of their lives.
“I came in here, we don’t know each other, we have some people in common,” Mindy shares. “You do seem so intimidating, your life is together, you’re so beautiful. Even in the Oprah thing I was like, ‘Oh my god, she has chickens. Who has their sh*t together enough to raise chickens and kids? Come on.'”
“And it’s nice to know that you were a lonely kid who didn’t like necessarily being that way. I’m not happy for it," she adds. "I didn’t know that and I'm happy I do.”
Meghan and Mindy bonded over their lives as “latchkey kids” while growing up and how they loved to read the Archie comics and escape their reality.
“My parents split up when I was around two or three years old, and I always wanted this cookie cutter-looking perfect life," the former Suits star says.
"And you looked at that and there’s like a boy in a letterman jacket and I romanticized that. It's all part of the things that make you have this idea of what you want your life to be like when you grow up," Meghan adds. "But I always thought, 'I’m way more Betty than Veronica' and am I going to get the guy one day and I was the smart one not the pretty one. So all of this stuff was wrapped up in reading Archie comic books. I think it was aspirational in some ways."
Meghan and Mindy agreed that the duchess' life came full circle.
“Well, you like redheads,” Mindy quips, with Meghan adding, “I do, and I like the name Archie. It's full circle."
RELATED CONTENT:
