And sometimes you can’t help but feel you’ve gone through the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole and back again, when you see the competing dialogues about the couple. Some U.K. publications, not to mention individuals who fuel the nastier trending topics on social media, are still relentless in their disparagement of both Harry and Meghan for spilling the family beans in interviews, their 2022 Netflix docuseries and his 2023 memoir Spare.
At the same time, the couple have plenty of fans, including ones behind the kinder hashtags who are are quick to point out the royal family’s perceived failings and defend the ones who were smart enough to get away from the onslaught.
“It’s like living through a soap opera where everyone else views you as entertainment,” Harry reflected in the Netflix series. “I felt really distant from my family, which was really interesting because of so much of how they operate is about what it looks like rather than what it feels like. And it looked cold, but it also felt cold.”
When Spare came out, he told ABC News’ Michael Strahan that with “everybody who has a large family, a family that you’ve been born into, there becomes a point when the family that you’ve created…becomes the priority over the family that you were born into.” So, he explained, the choice to leave “was very hard. But that was my thinking and the process in which I went through.”