The Duchess of Sussex shared her teenage wedding plans in the latest episode of her Archetypes podcast episode. It sees Meghan speaking with actress Mindy Kaling about the joys, challenges and stigmas of being a single, unmarried woman.
It begins with Meghan saying: “When I was 14, I planned my wedding. Not my actual wedding, that would have been a bit harder to imagine." The duchess described how it was actually a religious studies assignment at her Catholic school and how she wanted her wedding to be in the Bel Air hotel, with a “Swan Lake” and “oh my goodness, the dress, strapless and pouffy and I’d seen it in a bridal magazine”.
Meghan said: "I took this project seriously, I wanted to get an A. And I did. Maybe I got an A minus."
She then 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."
Discussing marriage, Meghan said: “What was and what is so threatening about women who live outside of marriage?” She added: “The associations our society makes around unmarried women feels so outdated and I wanted to give them a refresh.”
The duchess, introducing Kaling, said: “Mindy and I are talking about how her decision to have children as a single, unmarried woman showed her the importance of forging your own path.”
The pair discussed their favourite books as children, with Meghan saying she loved the Archie comics but insisted they were not the inspiration for her son Archie’s name. The duchess described how she was “alone so much as a child” and was a “latchkey kid”, saying she romanticised the Archie stories because she wanted the “cookie cutter-looking perfect life”.
Meghan said she wondered “Am I gonna get the guy one day?”, adding that she was “the smart one, not the pretty one”. The duchess 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."
The American Archie comics feature a main character who has red hair just like the Duke of Sussex. Archie Andrews is known as “America’s typical teenager” and he and his friends have been updated for a modern audience with Riverdale, a Netflix American teenage drama series.
