The Duchess of Sussex has dismissed comments she was lucky Prince Harry chose her as his bride as “gendered, archetyped and stereotyped” in a new podcast, released as the couple arrived in Germany to promote the Invictus Games.
Meghan said that when she and Harry got engaged, “everyone was just like: ‘Oh, my God, you’re so lucky, he chose you’. At a certain point, after you hear it a million times over, you’re like: ‘Well, I chose him, too.’
“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 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 said.
Meghan made the comments as she interviewed the US actor Mindy Kaling about the joys, challenges and stigmas of being a single woman.
It was released as the Sussexes arrived in Düsseldorf, west Germany, for the one-year countdown to the next Invictus Games, which are to be held in the city next year.
Meghan also revealed: “When I was 14, I planned my wedding. Not my actual wedding – that would have been a bit harder to imagine.” The wedding planning project was set as a religious studies assignment at her Catholic school.
The duchess, who has married twice, said she wanted her wedding to be in the Hotel Bel-Air with a “Swan Lake” and “oh my goodness, the dress, strapless and pouffy”.
“I took this project seriously; I wanted to get an A. And I did. Maybe I got an A-minus.” But she questioned why the assignment had even existed, saying: “At no point can you say: ‘Nope. My dream for the future is to be single.’
“The message even at my feminist all-girls school was as traditional as it gets. First comes love. Then comes marriage.” She recently revisited the school and discovered the wedding project has since been dropped, she said.
She also described being “alone so much as a child” and a “latchkey kid”, saying she romanticised the Archie comic stories because she wanted the “cookie cutter-looking perfect life”.
She wondered: “Am I gonna get the guy one day?” she said, but she was “the smart one, not the pretty one”.
When Kaling asked her: “Were you not the pretty one growing up?”, Meghan replied: “No. Oh, God, no.
“Ugly duckling … Maybe not conventional beauty – now maybe that would be seen as beautiful – but massive frizzy curly hair and a huge gap in my teeth. I was the smart one for ever and ever and ever and ever, and then just sort of grew up.”
She added: “It was really hard … I never had anyone to sit with at lunch. I was always a little bit of a loner and really shy, and didn’t know where I fit in.
“I was like: ‘I’ll become the president of the multicultural club and the president of sophomore class and the president of this and French club and …’ and, by doing that, I had meetings at lunchtime,” she added.
The couple were given a red-carpet welcome in Düsseldorf by hundreds of cheering fans and took part in a walkabout, with Harry giving a speech promoting the games for wounded service personnel and veterans, which he founded.
