In ‘Spare,’ Prince Harry Reveals Just How Much He Wanted to Get Married

It’s intriguing to hear a man—a prominent, conventionally desirable man no less—air his anxieties around marriage so openly and emotionally, a narrative generally relegated to women in literature and pop culture, thanks to the likes of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sex and the City (“I’ve been dating since I was 15. Where is he?”), and the ticking of Mona Lisa Vito’s biological clock in My Cousin Vinny. Harry’s Bridget Jones-ing for love points to the fact that men—including princes!—are hardly immune to the pressure to settle down, nor the draw of marriage as a societal status symbol and perceived achievement. These forces, however, were especially acute in the hierarchy of the Firm, where couples aren’t just love matches but power centers. 

“It went to the whole underpinning of the monarchy, which was based on marriage. The great controversies about kings and queens, going back centuries, generally centered on whom they married, and whom they didn’t, and the children who issued from those unions. You weren’t a fully vested member of the Royal Family, indeed a true human being, until you were wed,” Harry writes in what I found to be one of the most compelling passages in Spare. 

“No coincidence that Granny, head of state in sixteen countries, started every speech: ‘My husband and I…’ When Willy and Kate married they became The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, but more important they became a Household, and as such were entitled to more staff, more cars, bigger home, grander office, extra resources, engraved letterheads. I didn’t care about such perks, but I did care about respect. As a confirmed bachelor I was an outsider, a nonperson within my own family. If I wanted that to change, I had to get hitched. That simple.”

In marrying Meghan, Harry finally got the partner and the ally he’d craved—and, for a fleeting time, the royal “Household,” too—though it’s ironic that as soon as he became a certified Wife Guy, he began to feel like even more of an outsider. (Could it be that marriage gave him the solidarity and courage to lean even further into his rebellious side?) Of meeting Meghan and telling Prince William about her, Harry confesses “that this had long been my dream—to join [William and Kate] with an equal partner. To be a foursome.” We all know how that turned out.