Why William and Kate Are a ‘Fairy Tale’ but Harry and Meghan Are ‘Couple Goals’

The phrase fairy tale always seems to hover in the air whenever a marriage takes place within the English monarchy. And indeed, the three most high-profile royal weddings in modern history—those of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer, Prince William and Kate Middleton, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle—have all involved the classic fairy-tale story line of a prince sweeping a young, beautiful woman off her feet into the luxury and high status of royal life.

Prince Charles and Diana did not go on to live happily ever after, but from the outside at least, Prince William and Kate appear to be doing something akin to that. Prince Harry and Meghan, meanwhile, have gone on to forge a new version of the fairy-tale-princess fantasy. With their recent decision to step back from the royal family and opt out of its press-access agreements in order “to focus on the next chapter,” their story is one of the prince distancing himself from life as a royal for the woman he loves.

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Eli Finkel, a psychology professor at Northwestern University and the author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage, meanwhile, has a theory that over generations, couples have come to expect more and more from the institution of marriage. Early on, as Coontz noted, people married for economic security; later, people began to marry for love and companionship, but many also expected marriage to deliver economic security. Most recently, married people have added personal growth to the mix, expecting that, as Finkel told my colleague Olga Khazan in 2017, “our spouse will help us grow, help us become a better version of ourselves, a more authentic version of ourselves.”

In some senses, Finkel said, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are a perfect example of an ideal modern marriage, in that one partner has sacrificed a great deal to prioritize the other’s ability to live the way she wants. “We used to have these norms of responsibility to broader social units, these ideas that you were supposed to do what your community thought was appropriate. And if that meant that you were gay and had to hide your sexuality, well, then, that was the right thing to do,” Finkel told me in an interview. “Increasingly, the idea that we should have to live an inauthentic life is abhorrent. I think more and more of us view it as something close to immoral—like we shouldn’t force people to live a life where they have to suppress who they really are.”

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