Meghan Markle has revealed how she was a "bit of a loner" at school and spent much of her childhood alone.
In the latest episode of her Archetypes podcast, The Duchess of Sussex said that she struggled to fit in with her peers and, as a teenager, she joined as many clubs as possible to fill otherwise lonely lunchtimes at school.
She sat down with actor and writer Mindy Kaling to discuss the stigma surrounding single women. The pair also discussed the impact schooling had on their future lives, with Meghan, who attended the Immaculate Heart high school in Los Angeles, admitting: "I never had anyone to sit with at lunch."
She told Kaling: "I was always a little bit of a loner and really shy and didn’t know where I fitted in. So I thought, 'Oh I’ll just become the president of the multicultural club and president of sophomore class and president of French club'. That way I had meetings at lunch time and didn’t need to worry about who to sit with because I was so busy."
The Duchess said she was "alone so much as a child" and romanticised the popular Archie comics because she desired the ‘cookie cutter-looking perfect life’. She said: "I was alone so much as a child, right, and also a latchkey kid, and I think I read a lot of Archie comic books ironically. My son is not named after Archie comic books, but I loved them. I collected them.
"I think for me, especially, my parents split up when I was around two, three years old, and I always wanted this sort of cookie cutter-looking perfect life and you looked at that and there’s like a boy in a letterman jacket. I romanticised 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 grew up."
She added: "The associations our society makes around unmarried women feels so outdated and I wanted to give them a refresh. When I started dating my husband, we became 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'."
Meghan also revealed how she began planning her future wedding from an early age after being given an assignment at Immaculate Heart. 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 added that she had recently visited her former school and discovered that the assignment was no longer in place.
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