Spoilage of friendships can be viewed as the natural process of growing apart. It’s not so straightforward when parents are involved. Although Meghan had praised her father to the skies publicly, privately she had become concerned that a garrulous loose cannon like Thomas Markle Sr would cough up inconvenient facts which might cause Harry to query aspects of her past which did not accord perfectly with her present version of events. For instance, she had led Harry to believe that she had had a far harder life than she had. She had gained his admiration by making herself out to be far more self-sufficient than she had ever been, to have surmounted struggles that did not exist. She had told him how hard she had had to struggle to put herself through university when, in fact, her time there had been one long joyride on her father’s bandwagon. She didn’t want Tom Sr giving the game away and shining a light on those aspects of her persona which were, to put it politely, self-generated rather than organic.
These were sound reasons for not introducing Harry to her father before the wedding. The worst possible scenario for Meghan would have been father and fiancé getting along so well that Daddy would give Harry enough information for him to realise that Flower had not been forged in quite so much steel as Harry thought she had been. He loved her strength. He drew strength and certainty from it. She could not afford to have him question the authenticity of the struggles she had evoked, though, ironically, there had been challenges. They had simply been between Meghan and herself, largely based around her identity and the embarrassment she had felt as she passed for white while being bi-racial. They had not been between Meghan and a harsh, racist world, as she now wanted people to believe, for no one could identify one incident throughout the whole of her life when she had been subjected to racist prejudice, though everyone could remember many times when she had not been subjected to any prejudice at all. Such strictures as she had faced with the world at large had been based solely on her desire to be acknowledged as special, as a star, as someone who was exceptional and out of the ordinary. These were the ordinary, mundane, everyday frustrations of an ordinary but ambitious person who viewed herself as special, pitting herself against the world until they acknowledged her view of herself as being more accurate than their own. In summation, her struggles were the ordinary tussles of an ordinary woman as she surmounted the restrictions of ordinariness until she could change them for the acknowledgement of specialness. It was the conventional journey of people pre and post fame; nothing more, nothing less. It was an everyday tale told by countless people of all hues and creeds. It had nothing to do with racial or sexual prejudice. It certainly had nothing to do with a deprived background, and all to do with the deeply unglamorous strictures of ambition.
Meghan is not an actress for nothing. She understands drama and appreciates its value. She is bright and talented enough to understand that a theatrical narrative is more engaging than a pedestrian one. One plucks at the heartstrings, the other leaves the emotions cold. She had worked herself into the position of prima donna assoluta, and now faced the task of maintaining her ascendency without having inconvenient relations like her father opening her version of events up to inspection. Nor could she convincingly eradicate her father without arousing suspicion. So she controlled his attendance instead. It was obvious that the safest course of action had been to get Tom Sr to fly over just before the wedding. There would be so much going on then, that there would be no time for him to interact too deeply with Harry. Her devoted swain would continue to believe that she was this brave lioness who had fought her way up in a cruel world, instead of being the pampered Flower who had been nurtured the way she really had been.
Harry is a very emotional person. He has great emotional intelligence even though he is not outstanding in its intellectual equivalent. Meghan, on the other hand, is highly intelligent, highly skilled socially, and highly effusive. She functions at a fever pitch of passion, enthusiasm and spontaneity that come across as warmth, though people who have been dumped by her regard her as insincere and opportunistic to a fault. Whether they are right or wrong, she is superficially appealing and captivating, has a talent for making people believe that she is what they want her to be, knows just what note to strike to gain the regard of those she wants to impress, and possesses sang froid in its fullest meaning.
According to people who know them well, Meghan won Harry by appealing to his genuinely humanitarian instincts. She did this by demonstrating her own humanitarian credentials, articulating philanthropic values which she knew he possessed, while making herself vulnerable in his eyes. She endeared herself by appealing to his sympathies, by mirroring them, by making him aware of how much she had suffered at the hands of a cruel world while gaining his admiration for the brave and noble way she had coped. She could not have Daddy blow this touching picture of suffering, which she had never actually experienced, out of the water by shooting his mouth off.
There is much evidence to suggest that Meghan is by far a stronger and more forceful individual than Harry. Beneath the blustering Alpha male lies a sensitive boy who identifies and sympathises with those who have suffered. For all the good works Meghan has done, she has never really suffered loss and therefore does not possess a similar
