People say that because Harry is a ginger and Diana had an affair with a ginger named James Hewitt. Theis is a rather striking resemblance, but Hewitt says the affair didn’t begin until after Harry was already born.
I lived in England for three years as a kid. I know what the “expectations” are, I’m just asking hypothetically. It seems to me that the expectations are anachronistic and sexist.
She seems like quite a traditional woman - I can’t see her choosing not to have children.
Of course, it’s always possible that they won’t be able to have kids.
They weren’t even in the same country (he was in the armed forces abroad) when Harry was conceived and hadn’t been for quite a while. Harry looks like the Spencers, that’s all.
My daughter looks a hell of lot like my ex, so much so that people were often convinced they were related and were sceptical when we said they weren’t, but given that both my ex and I female, I’d say it’s pretty obvious she’s not the father.
Fair enough, and you do have a point. I’m talking about what I think will happen, not what should happen. That would probably belong in another thread, and I suspect we would strongly disagree.
Harry looks more and more like his dad every passing day (Prince Charles) He’s got the Windsor ears, and the Spencer hair. William has the Windsor hair. Ouch, that’ll not be helped by having to wear a helmet at the day job. And hats, generally, for the official stuff.
I can see anachronistic, but not sexist. The pressure put on William to reproduce: Kate’s only responsibility is to be honest with her husband. If she doesn’t want kids, I don’t think it’s sexist to say she should have communicated this to him (royalty or not). He’s the one that is unlikely to have married anyone who didn’t want children because he is the one that bears the pressure of the expectation to reproduce.
That may be, but the facts are that she’s not stupid, so she knew what she was getting into, and if she doesn’t want kids there is no way she would consider marrying the heir to the throne. I’m sure it was one of the first things William and Kate talked about when they were first dating – years ago!
You can’t seriously be suggesting that she would marry the guy she married without understanding that she was expected to pop out an heir and a spare. That would be as silly as a man who wanted a stay-at-home wife & mother to wed a woman who was a career Naval officer who said, on their first date and throughout her courtship, that she aimed to the first female captain of the USS Enterprise.
We don’t know what they discussed. Besides. She has a right to change her mind. She doesn’t owe anybody a baby. She wasn’t hired to do a job. All she did was marry a guy she liked.
I’m not sure Hewitt’s word is the final say on the matter. We know he’s a cheat, he has every reason to deny being Harry’s father, and the resemblance is ridiculously strong.
I don’t know for sure one way or another but if you got a DNA test, had it in a sealed envelope, and told me “Alright, you have to put a hundred bucks on it one way or the other” I absolutely would put my $100 on Prince Harry not being Prince Charles’s biological child.
I’m not sure of it, but that’s where I’d put a few bucks.
From some of the posts upthread, I gather that they dated eight years before marrying. If that is true, I cannot imagine the issue has never come up. How old are they, anyway? Mid-twenties?
I don’t know what they discussed anyway, any more than you do. But since she is (I gather) an adult who’s been involved romantically with the heir to the heir of England for, what a third of her life, it seems ridiculous to think that she doesn’t realize that bearing a child is expected. She doesn’t owe William a child, but she does owe him honesty, no?
Of course she doesn’t owe anyone a baby. But it’s most likely that William wouldn’t have married anyone who didn’t want to have children, and it’s most likely that they discussed it over the course of their relationship, and it’s unlikely that she would change her mind after the better part of a decade.
If she does decide she doesn’t want to have a child (totally her right), then it would also be totally his right to divorce her, and, again, he would likely be under tremendous pressure to do so. Again, the pressure to reproduce would be on him, not her. No one (outside her family) particularly cares if she has kids. Anachronistic, yes. Sexist? Still can’t see it.
Just because a child is “expected” by people outside the marriage whose business it is not doesn’t mean that she ever agreed to have any, or even that William wants any.
I would assume that William married her because he loved her, not because he wanted to acquire a brood sow.
As for pressure on William - what is anybody going to do to him if he doesn’t want kids?
One stone, then, oops. No, I don’t think she’s at period-stopping level, but I’d like to see her with a few more curves.
And yes, I am sure she understands that part of marriage to the heir to the heir to the throne is to be a mother in due course.
I think that’s a very presumptuous expectation.
Marriage is not necessarily based on the modern idea of romantic love. A good marriage doesn’t have to be.
Don’t mistake that for me knocking love, because, like I believe in it, Alfie. But historically marriage has been about other things. And we don’t actually know why William married her; none of us are his intimates, so far as I know.
What family does everywhere when there are specific expectations for a child: never shut up about it. Could he resist it? Of course. But it seems unlikely that he would want to: the expectation has been there since his birth, it’s in like with what most people want, anyways, and it’s not particularly onerous.
No one is saying that they must have kids. Only that the odds lean very strongly towards the probability that they will. I mean, in the US, at least, 80% of women have children, and I assume the number is similar in the UK. Add that to the expectations put on royalty, and it seems pretty safe to say that they will probably at least attempt to have kids.
I still have not seen anything sexist about any of this.
Now, if you want to argue that it’s tacky to speculate on when they will have kids, or really none of our business, or a waste of time, I tend to agree with you–which is why I haven’t commented on the particulars. But that seems to me like threadshitting, and if that’s what your real problem with the thread is, it would probably just be easiest to stay out of it.
It is my business as it potentially determines who will be my head of state. It’s clear that, despite what you said earlier, you don’t understand how it works. She’s a princess now, not a private person.
And how do you know they didn’t say “Yeah, this whole royal thing is pretty silly. Let’s freak everyone out by not having kids,” or “Gee, I’m pretty upset about my mom dying when I was you. I don’t feel like I’d be a great father.” Or any number of things. You have absolutely no idea how they’ve decided to handel this.
It’s not the idea that being royalty comes with expectations that is off-putting, as much as how people seem so gleeful people seem to “put a woman in her place.”
Well, if all she wanted to do was marry the guy she could have suggested they elope to Vegas. No, she helped plan the lovely but fairly conventional ceremony in Frakking Westminster Abbey. She knows damn well what she’s getting into; yes, she is marrying into his Family Business. She will have the job of Princess & Queen for the rest of her life. They will probably tweak tradition now & then but still do their duties–in exchange for which they get considerable perks. Like Diana, she won’t let the servants raise the children; but there will always be Help.