Or is Meghan Markle making the right choice?

[CaliforniaDream]

I don't know if it actually was her choice or her father's, but it seems to me that it's the right decision for him not to come to the wedding.

He's obviously not at all well and needs to recover from his heart attack. He is also obviously wildly in over his head with the media. I think Kensington Palace have something to answer for there as they should have taken him under their wing from the start and given him more help in dealing with press speculation. But the damage is done and now he has caused himself and his daughter a lot of heartache - that must be causing him stress, and I think he will be happier and more healthy for missing it.

I really feel for Meghan. She obviously had quite a complex and uneasy relationship with her dad. She must feel so betrayed that he went behind her back to have these press photographs taken, and it seems he is also texting gossip fodder directly to TMZ. While there are mitigating factors, he very clearly hasn't been putting his daughter's wellbeing first. If he had, she'd be able to have her dad at her wedding and now she can't.

I hope she still has a great day on Saturday, and that her father recovers, and that she's able to move on from this and have a reasonable relationship with him.

Quite, TobysAunt.

I was reading an article in The New Yorker about the Japanese, who routinely hire relatives for weddings etc, to show that they have the "approved" number of family and old friends. The thing is that due to a shrinking birth rate, most people don't have large numbers of relatives, so everyone is conning each other.

Dh and I are a bit lacking in the family stakes. It's just luck of the draw. I do have a lot of cousins, but most of them I never see, some I have never seen, and I certainly wouldn't invite them to a wedding! It would be bizarre if my dcs one day were to marry someone famous (or indeed if I dump dh and grab myself a spare age-appropriate royal) and the press manage to drag up some remote dissolute cousin and wonder why they're not invited to the wedding.

Irma with the greatest respect we are not talking about someone who doesn’t have any family. MM has family they were just not at the wedding for some reason. I still think it odd that Doria was not accompanied by a close friend when she flew over. I think it was planned to just be MM and her mother

Yes I'm fairly confident MM never intended for her father to attend - he certainly would have ruined the elegance of the group photographs, never mind her parade up the aisle. Her mother was the only relative that could be trusted not to betray any secrets or show her up on the big day. IMO.

I was saying to dh that there was so much talk of MM's heritage, but there was a glaring hole of 50% of it!