You can hate Thomas Markle or you can feel sorry for him, especially after his latest tell-all interview in which he unloads his bitter feelings for his daughter Meghan Markle, his son-in-law Prince Harry and the rest of the royal family.
But there was a clear sign long ago that things would sour in Meghan’s relationship with her father and that the retired Hollywood lighting designer could become a major PR and legal headache.
This red flag came when Meghan, for some reason, didn’t arrange for her father and Harry to meet in person in advance of her royal wedding, according to HuffPost and other reports. Did she worry the two men wouldn’t get along or that her 75-year-old father would embarrass her? Did she just not have the time as she planned her wedding and prepared to enter royal life?
According to Thomas Markle’s Channel 5 interview, he only talked to Harry by phone and first met him when Meghan rang to say, “I’ve got a new boyfriend” and “He’s Prince Harry.”
"They are destroying it, they are cheapening it, making it shabby – they are turning it into a Walmart with a crown on it now."
Meghan's father has criticised the couple's decision to step back from the Royal Family.
More here: https://t.co/NIRgevWgrK pic.twitter.com/aKLVmLfvUO
— Sky News (@SkyNews) January 19, 2020
Thomas Markle has previously said he wasn’t set to meet his son-in-law face-to-face and spend time with him until several days before he was scheduled to walk his daughter down the aisle in front of a global TV audience — a high-stress, high-stakes situation if ever there was one.
So, that means Meghan and Harry planned to wait until the last minute for the future son- and father-in-law to meet — which is something relationship experts and wedding planning experts advise couples to avoid if possible.
Most modern couples, when contemplating marriage, also seem to know better. They arrange a dinner or fly home for a long weekend visit, sometimes before an engagement is even announced. This “meet the parents” rite of passage was the premise for, yes, the “Meet the Parents” movie. Even a reality TV series like “The Bachelor” understands the familial significance of these pre-marital meet-ups with its “hometown dates” episodes.
“If the movie, ‘Meet the Parents,’ isn’t enough proof, introducing your significant other to your parents is a really big deal,” begins a post on WeddingWire.com, a wedding planning site.
“It’s one of the biggest steps you can take in your relationship — both the one you have with your partner and the one you have with your parents,” the post continues, adding that “timing” is key to introducing one’s partner to one’s parents.
Above all, you don’t want your partner to meet your parents during “a stressful time” — such as after a death in the family or a job loss, WeddingWire.com said. The countdown to a royal wedding probably counts as a stressful time.
But the post gets to the crux of why a positive pre-marital meeting is important and why there are long-term benefits to nurturing this bond. “Any person you decide to spend your life with and legally bound yourself to ultimately becomes their family, too,” the post said.
So, yes, Thomas Markle is “family” to Harry, whether Harry wants that or not.
For the time being, Thomas Markle also continues to have tea to spill on his daughter — who has won both admirers and enemies on both sides of the Atlantic for her and Harry’s historic decision to exit royal life. Both the tabloids and the mainstream media are eager to report on the drama, and Thomas Markle offers a unique background with the saga’s leading lady.
Perhaps most alarming for Meghan, Thomas Markle is poised to become a key witness in her invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the tabloid The Daily Mail for publishing portions of an emotional letter she sent him after the wedding. So, it’s possible that the estranged daughter and father will meet in a London courtroom sometime in 2020.
Royal observers have long wondered whether all this mess with Thomas Markle could have been avoided, if the royal family had done a better job of paying attention to the retiree in the run-up to the wedding.
At one point, after Thomas Markle began bashing his daughter in the media, the duchess’s friends reportedly insisted that she had been estranged from her father long before the wedding.
But that doesn’t make sense. Thomas Markle was a guest at her first wedding in Jamaica in 2011 to producer Trevor Engelson, the Daily Mail reported. She also thought enough of her father to include him, with her mother Doria Ragland, in the Nov. 27, 2017 tweet from Kensington Palace, announcing her engagement to Harry.
Ms. Markle's parents, Mr. Thomas Markle and Doria Ragland have wished the couple 'a lifetime of happiness.' pic.twitter.com/H4kpTgpkYE
— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) November 27, 2017
And then Meghan asked her father to walk her down the aisle.
The Thomas Markle imbroglio is generally thought to have begun when a tabloid revealed the weekend before the May 19, 2018, wedding that Thomas Markle had worked with a photographer to stage paparazzi shots of himself. That Monday, an embarrassed Thomas Markle announced he would not attend the wedding. The next day, he said he would fly to the U.K. after all, but then ultimately pulled out after he said he needed emergency surgery for a heart problem.
That week’s back-and-forth over the paparazzi shots and the insensitive things Thomas Markle claims Meghan and Harry said about his health emergency marked the beginning of the end of the father-laugher relationship. Thomas Markle soon began to give interviews to TMZ or to the U.K. media about how the couple had stopped speaking to him.
In an August 2018 op-ed for the Daily Mail, royal commentator Richard Kay said that Buckingham Palace should have known how to help someone like Thomas Markle enter the royal orbit. Kay said a palace aide told him that the treatment of Markle had been “inept.”
“The perception is that he was treated very much as an afterthought,” the aide told Kay. “No one went to visit him when the answer would have been to have someone fly out from London and explain to him how things were going to happen.”
In his interview, Thomas Markle makes it sounds as though he was less than “an afterthought” to Meghan and Harry. He said, “Meghan and Harry said they would protect me from (stress). Their protection was simply to say, ‘don’t talk to anybody.'”
Perhaps if Meghan and Harry had flown out to meet with Thomas Markle sometime before the wedding, they could have assessed whether he could handle the stress of the wedding, or of becoming a target for paparazzi. They could also have determined how much he could be trusted to, say, not turn on them and claim this week that the royals “owe him” and that it’s time for Meghan to “look after daddy.”
Anita Chlipala, author of the book “First Comes Us: The Busy Couple’s Guide to Lasting Love” acknowledged to Bustle in 2017 that such meetings can be difficult for many couples to arrange, given people’s busy schedules, costs, or their geographical distance from their parents.
For Meghan and Harry, the logistics of traveling to Thomas Markle’s home in Mexico, just south of the U.S. border, would have been huge. They would have needed to arrange security and probably would have wanted to travel in secret to avoid media attention. But if security and secrecy were a concern, couldn’t they have flown Thomas Markle to the U.K. for a quiet weekend, maybe out in the country at some castle?
Chlipala said such meetings are worth the effort, because people can gain useful information about their future in-laws, as well as about their future spouse.
“Meeting the parents can provide a wealth of information about the person that you’re dating that may have taken you additional weeks or even months to learn,” Chlipala told Bustle. “Others may want to meet the parents to see how their significant other is around them — how they interact, whether they are respectful toward their parents, how they handle conflict or something unexpected, or even the kind of stories the parents share about him or her.”
Chlipala added that people should take note if their future spouse is reluctant to introduce them to their parents — barring any history of neglect, abuse or other serious dysfunction.
“I do think there is a ‘too late,'” Chlipala told Bustle. “If you’re in a committed relationship for months and you haven’t met the parents, chances are pretty good that you’re dating someone who isn’t comfortable with intimacy and/or commitment.”
