As Prince Harry confirmed near the end of his and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, there has been a significant breakdown in his once-close relationship with his brother Prince William; as Harry told Oprah, the word that currently defines the relationship is “space.” There is still a lot we don’t know, and that Harry declined to reveal, about what exactly led to the divide between the brothers, but it has been previously reported that it started when William urged Harry to take his time when his relationship with Meghan began.
“Don’t feel you need to rush this,” William told Harry, according to last summer’s biography Finding Freedom. “Take as much time as you need to get to know this girl.” As the book’s authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand wrote, the phrase “the girl” immediately bothered Harry: “Harry was pissed off… that his brother would ask such a thing.”
But after what Meghan revealed in the interview about how poorly prepared she felt for life as a royal, both by her own choice—she says she didn’t even Google Harry, and that “I went into it very naively”—and due to what she called a lack of support within the palace, William’s words ring with a sad irony. What he reportedly said was condescending and understandably rankled a brother who was already falling in love, but it’s also hard not to imagine how things might have turned out better if everyone had taken just a little more time.
When she first came to…
