Opinion

Bimpe Archer: There's real-life drama behind every picture of perfection

With controversy surrounding her father, Meghan Markle's build-up to her wedding to Prince Harry has been less than smooth
With controversy surrounding her father, Meghan Markle's build-up to her wedding to Prince Harry has been less than smooth With controversy surrounding her father, Meghan Markle's build-up to her wedding to Prince Harry has been less than smooth

WHATEVER your view of the British royal family, it will have been hard not to have felt for Meghan Markle this week.

All being well, she will marry her fiancé tomorrow, and should have been spending this week in delicious anticipation of her 'big day'.

OK, her fiancé is a prince and her big day is a great deal larger than most brides' - by a factor of several million - but one has to assume that she knew what she was getting into and, wedding jitters aside, was looking forward to it.

Of course that's what we assume about all weddings - that the happy couple are looking forward to it with unalloyed joy and it will be the perfect day reflected in photographs on mantelpieces across the world.

Even when we've been through it ourselves and know we were so nervous at the wedding rehearsal we couldn't look at anyone, much less the groom-to-be, or eat, or sleep the night before the wedding. Photoshop works its magic on the memory as well as the dark circles.

In reality there is nothing perfect about even the loveliest wedding. There is guest-list stress (I still get the dry heaves when I get particular flashbacks), and guest stress, and dress drama (Oh the dress drama...), and first dance trauma.

I was reading to my child the other night when it struck me that among the first stories we heard were fairy tales where the happy ending is 'the wedding'.

It was jarring to come across the trope again, partly because modern children's entertainment, quite sensibly, leaves romance for the adults and instead concentrates on tales of adventure and friendship.

Why on earth were past generations force-fed notions of helpless women whose miserable lives were transformed by the good fortune of being pretty enough and 'good' enough to capture the heart of a wealthy prince? (Actually we know why, but that's a column for another day.)

One of the more benign things it has done is to somehow hardwire the notion of a 'perfect' wedding day and like all notions of perfection, the stress when something happens to mar that can feel devastating.

It's not just confined to weddings, of course. Perfection is an elusive beast, it lurks around exam halls, musical recitals, dinner parties, job interviews.

We can see it out of the corner of our eyes, but turn too quickly and it's gone, leaving you with an 'F' grade, a flat note, burnt gnocchi and another round of CVs to send off.

And somehow it's not just a bad grade or charred potato, it is a feeling of mortification, because that is how it feels to fall short of what we think perfection could have been.

We imagine that everyone knows what we were trying to achieve and how far we have fallen short and that thought can be unbearable. The desire to retreat to the safety of your bed, pull the sheets over your head and never come out again is a compelling one.

The thing is, though - everybody doesn't know.

The number of people who really know us well enough to think about us when we're not in front of them is in the single digits. No, really, it is.

No matter what you say in that job interview, if the people on the other side of the table don't give you the job, they will probably never think about you again. There won't even be a glimmer of recognition if your trolley collides with theirs at the frozen veg section of Asda.

And the people for the people who know you well enough to remember things - that burnt dinner isn't even on the top 10 most interesting things that happened to them that week.

None of this, I imagine, will much comfort to Ms Markle, I'm sure. As a successful actress, she is used to big audiences and was preparing for the biggest of her life.

Between 122-176 million people watched Kate Middleton marry Prince William in 2011. A hundredth of that number would still be almost the population of Northern Ireland.

A good proportion of them will have watched as Meghan's family drama unfolded - reports of her father Thomas Markle's staged paparazzi pictures, the news that, with just four days to go, he would not be walking her down the aisle, then that he had changed his mind. And then he was having heart surgery...

It's hard to maintain the veneer of serene happiness floating down the aisle in front of millions of people when you know they all know the complicated and depressing behind-the-scenes drama.

But, if it's any comfort - for all those millions, it's not even in the top 10 most complicated, depressing or dramatic things happening in their lives right now.