A couple months ago Princess Letizia went on a solo vacation and there was a lot of gossip about marriage problems between her and Filipe. In retrospect, I wonder if she needed to get her head around the whole “Queen sooner than I thought” thing.
She always seems a little more self conscious and uncomfortable than Europe’s other princesses by marriage. Except maybe Charlene.
Charlene is pregnant. I would have made a run for it if I had been her. She was the most uncomfortable bride I’ve ever seen. You have to wonder how many love children of Albert’s we haven’t heard about. Not exactly a classy prince, that one.
She started off on the wrong foot with the royal gossip fiends the day she and Felipe announced their engagement in an interview because she scolded him for interrupting her. Never mind that he apologized like a normal person and let her finish: apparently this is Not How It’s Done, Lady. If the Prince of Asturias wishes to interrupt, one’s job is to know one’s place and shut up while he speaks. One certainly does not call him out on it. Or something like that.
There’s a whole cadre of people who were skeptical of her background and divorcee status and that just gave them ammunition to say she was unsuitable. Once it was a done deal, they moved on to her associations, rumored plastic surgery, her weight or lack thereof, and other catty middle school pastimes. I imagine it’s fairly irksome.
I heard about her pregnancy.
He comes from a classy family.
The one I really like is Crown Princess Mary - she looks and seems so normal - and yet comfortable.
And Letitiza is the paragon of princesses compared to Mette-Marit - who seems much more comfortable in the role (but I suspect Norweign middle school gossip may be less catty - and Mette-Marit doesn’t give a fuck).
The Grimaldi men seem to have a horndog gene.
And the means (crown, title, palace, country) to fully indulge it. Lucky bastards.
Saw this on facebook yesterday:
“Nobody expects the Spanish abdication”.
Royalty is, at least in part, a form of national soap opera so it’s not that surprising really.
Then they should prefer a monarch who creates such drama, no?
Within certain reasonable limits, yes.
The limits being legality, I should think. Or actual cruelty.
If it’s a soap opera, isn’t outrageous infidelity the entire point?
Yeah, it’s not so much that he did do what rich powerful people usually do, but that after a while some kings and queens lose the élan for it, and in some cases start Doing It Wrong.
I mean, people can understand sugardaddying a few babes, but flying to *&^%$ Botswana to hunt elephants is way above almost everyone’s league and just terrible optics, especially it’s you who comes back injured, and not by the elephant (hey, face it, “King Nearly Trampled By Elephant” would have given the Bourbons the win over the Windsors for the year [actual trampling = whole decade]. That beats any number of royal babies or naked dukes). Add to that having your inlaws suddenly becoming very rich in their “businesses” and their “nonprofits” while the rest of the country is in the doldrums, and the drama takes a turn for the worst.
In other words, unlike what was stated before, the infidelity isn’t the main concern.
Nah, only with the ones from ABC, who are so far to the right they might find themselves on the left some day. The rest of the country said “good for her” both on general grounds and because it was taken as a sign that maybe she’d be able to survive such a marriage with her sanity and sense of self somewhat intact.
Those dudes are also the only ones who cared about the “trial marriage”. Many people in Spain don’t consider something that short and civil-only as a “real one”, but as a mistake that went just a bit too far.
I didn’t say that the infidelity was the main concern, but that to many people (specifically, to many women), being both unfaithful and unstylish about it was a big concern. Previously, there had been quite a few women who were rumored to be the King’s lovers, but none had said “yes I’ve been” and tried to make money out of it. The one who was with him in that safari did: that does not reflect well on his judgment.
So what’s Juan Carlos’s (& by extension Queen Sophia) title going to be after the abdication? 
Does he get to keep the title “king” as a personal title like abdicated Belgian monarchs or revert to prince/infante like abdicated Dutch monarchs?
Revert to prince, I think, but I haven’t seen anything about that.
He’s going to keep the title of king. So Queen Sofia won’t have to rush to find a way to become a widow.
Queen Sofia would have been “the Queen Mother” anyway if she’d become a widow, it was just a matter of saying “ok, so male version, King (Father)”.
Rex Pater? Rey Padre?
In Spanish, rey padre, but since there is no danger of confusion if you use the name, I imagine he will usually be called any of the variations between *el Rey don Juan Carlos *and Juancar, same as now (not that newspapers are likely to say Juancar… people do; oh, and Jon Txarli in Basque-TV-in-Spanish sketches, pronounced like John Charlie).