I think that relationships are complicated. We have far too much of a black and white view of how things are supposed to be, and if there is any deviation from that, we proclaim it to be wrong.
How many people on here have a “one that got away.”? In most cases that person will have moved on, and then they meet someone else and have a happy marriage. But if that marriage doesn’t work out then it’s not inconceivable that the “one that got away” could come back into their life.
Diana and Charles were ill-suited from the start. But the institution needed him to be married to someone who was “wholesome”, not someone who, years down the track, might have a former lover crawl out of the woodwork professing that “I slept with the queen.”
I didn’t like Diana. She was fake and manipulative, and not all of that was of the royals’ making. And she had her own affairs, shagged married men after her divorce (will Carling anyone?” But because she’s dead not a bad word can be said against her. I think that she would have fallen far out of favour by now had she not died.
As for “they don’t live together/it’s just convenience/they can’t get divorced,” says who? The tabloids? A friend of a friend’s butler’s assistant? There is literally no point reading the tabloids and the made up gossip on these people because nobody knows what goes on in someone else’s relationship.
And passion? I don’t think most 70+ year olds have passionate sex-filled relationships, that doesn’t mean they aren’t happily married though.
And recently there was a thread on here talking about living separately from your husband, and the overwhelming majority of posters seemed to think it would be a fabulous idea. But someone else does it and then the speculation has to start about how it’s not really a marriage.