Diana's age at time of marriage.

[Peedoffo]

I'm in my 20s so I really don't remember Diana. I did more reading on the subject and I can't believe the establishment thought it was ok to marry a 19 year old off to a man 13 years older than her who had no interest in her. No wonder she struggled this was the 1980s as well not the Victorian times! Could anyone around then tell me , why did her family back/support the marriage? Was there any concerns from the public ? I would be horrified at the thought of marrying my DD off at 19 to a much older man who wasn't really interest.

I'm the same age as Diana. I was at uni when she married. Could not have imagined myself marrying at that age. Eventually married at 36.
Everyone knew Charles was expected to marry a virgin. Nobody mentioned Camilla at the time.

@OoooohBobMonkhouse
Totally agree with your post. I left school in 1971. My best friend at school had a 'boyfriend' called Tony, she was 15, he was 29 but he had a red sports car and picked her up after school. We all thought she was so coooool and all the mean girls thought she was too! Apparently they went to bed together but kept their pants on and only hugged! He was obviously a fruit loop and worse. I think he just wanted to talk and talk and talk to her.

As for Diana marrying Charles I was in my late 20s then, didn't think much about the age gap but did think why on earth would a beautiful girl like that marry such a stuffed shirt like Charles.

I think she grew up quickly and acquired star quality and the rest is history. I loved it when she found her voice.

I remember Diana's Dad Earl Spencer marrying the only child of Barbara Cartland, Raine. And Diana hating her and calling her Acid Raine! That made me laugh. They eventually kissed and made up before Raine died.

Same sort of timeline for me and I am older than Diana. I had a blast in my twenties, and independent life earning lots of money, I couldn't imagine getting married. I eventually did at 33

I don't think anyone in Diana's family actually thought about her needs as a person. Parents distant and dysfunctional, older sisters moving on with their own very suitable marriages, younger teenage brother. No-one really saw her, imo.

Not in my experience. For those of us that moved away to university, marriage was looked down on as an outdated, provincial, anti-woman institution. People had children out of marriage and this was becoming acceptable and normal -we thought we were very daring and breaking societal norms of small-town UK. We got married much, much later when we’d come to our senses about the protection marriage gives.

I think you were unusual then. I didn’t have this experience at all. I also went to University.

This what I don't understand. My mother was a teenage single mother in 1983. ( I was born later) . She never commented about single parent stigma, she married my dad when she was 25. There was a small age gap. Some of the experiences on here sound like from a widely different time I did meet my DH when I was 18 and he was 24 so there was an age gap but it wasn't arranged by our parents and was definitely a love match. It's not so much she got married young but the circumstances around it she barely knew him!

It seems that there was a societal shift but it was happening at different paces around the country.

I agree, my cousin was born to unmarried parents in 1985, no stigma. They eventually married when their daughter was 17 & were delighted to have their child as their witness.

@Krakenwakes
I totally agree with what you say. I am the same age as Diana. Feminism had been around for years by the time she married. People like Germaine Greer were household names. Almost everyone I knew talked about marriage as an outdated institution. Look at the books and films and TV programmes of the time and what people were wearing. It wasn’t Victorian times! In so many ways, I find younger generations quite conservative.

Everyone I knew at the time thought Diana was too young to marry and that it was awful she was marrying someone much older.

As you can see lots of people who were the same age as her thought the match undesirable. However, Diana got married at the tail end of a time when the age of first marriage for women was low. In the mid-1970s, "over a quarter (28%) of all women were married by the age of 20". In 1981 specifically, half of all first-time brides were aged 22 or below ONS Source]. That had been the pattern since 1941, that is, for the previous 40 years there had been lots of young first-time brides. At the time of her wedding, most adults would have known other 20-year old brides, and it wasn't as remarkable as it would be today.

Charles was advised by Lord Mountbatten to marry someone who hadn't had previous relationships, and was fairly young. Specifically, Mountbatten hoped that Charles would marry his then 16-year old granddaughter, Amanda. Charles did propose to her a few years later, but she turned him down.

My own take is that he had been looking for someone suitable to marry who was likely to be aged say 23 or under, since he was about 25 and didn't revise his approach as he himself got older. He probably would have been happier marrying someone closer to his own age regardless of who it was. As other people have noted, he seemed old for his years when he was in his early 30s.

I don't think you can say it was geographical. I was in London, which was as diverse then as it is now, but in the mid to late 80s in my workplace, the London HQ of a major accountancy firm, it was very socially conservative. The intake of trainees was 50:50 male/female, which was a huge change from a few years earlier, but nobody was openly gay, as far as I can recall. Although quite a few colleagues were living with a partner and not married, it was very much not the norm to have a child without being married. There was no sense whatsoever that marriage was an outdated institution. Most of us were either married or engaged. Some of the older staff members were divorced, of course.

This had all been very different at university a few years earlier, but the left-leaning radical feminists and Militant/SWP/Communist activists who were so vocal on campus ended up in other lines of work, which were probably just as much echo chambers as my workplace. My husband was working in a university and his colleagues' social attitudes were much more diverse than my colleagues'.

A few years later when I was finally pregnant myself and started meeting people in our local area, there was a far more mixed picture. Plenty of new parents who weren't married, single parents, lesbian couples.

It's quite similar to traditional arranged marriages

I’m in my 50s. It was not usual to marry as a teenager then. Absolutely not. I mean, it happened, but it wasn’t that common. The youngest of my peer group was 23, and her partner was around the same age.

and marrying so quickly? To someone that much older? Creepy.

As others have said it's frustrating when people who weren't even born start trying to explain how things were, and it's pretty clear that even those of us the same age had sifferent experiences.

My school had been a girls' grammar but combined with the boys' grammar and 3 other secondary modern schools. Of our year group of 360 pupils only 36 went into sixth form and about 2 girls and 3 boys went to university, while a few more went to polytechnic. The vast majority went out to work at 16, including me.

I met DH at a party on the day of Charles and Diana's wedding. I was 18, he was 20 and we married 2 years later. By then I was on Day Release at college paid for by work and I was the last to marry out of the 4 of us who formed a friendship group. One married at 18 years old and the other 2 were 19. All of us were living with our parents so "set up home" on marriage. No way would I have been allowed to "live in sin". It might have been becoming popular in London but it was unthinkable in my parents' circles and would have caused them huge embarrassment.

When I had our first baby I was 22 and the oldest - by far - of the new mums on our ward 😮

I remember reading something in a magazine back in 1981 that said Diana was so damaged by her parents divorce that she married the one man in England who could never divorce her. I often thought of that later when everything went so wrong.

there is a really good BBC documentary called High Society Brides about the 'Girls in Pearls' which helped me understand a bit about Diana's circle in the 80s. She wasn't the only upper-class/aristocratic girl marrying someone she barely knew out of obligation. There was this huge pressure to continue bloodlines, it was all very throwbacky even then - debutantes etc were really not a thing any more - but they had very few other options money wise.

Some of the women's stories are so sad. One ran away from her alcoholic cheating husband along with her tiny baby, trudged to the edge of their remote ancestral estate hoping to get a lift from a passing car, but the first car that came was him out looking for her so she went back home with him and that was it. So I think Diana's story is not completely unique but only occurred in a very tiny pocket of society.

My own parents got married a year or two after Charles and Diana, in their early 20s. I think it really depends on your general social circle what is 'normal'. My mum, for example, did not take my dad's name which was regarded by her family as pretty chippy and radical; on the other hand she'd never have contemplated having children outside of marriage and she considered herself an 'old' first-time mum at 28. They'd have had kids earlier if they could - my aunt was 21 when she had her first baby and that wasn't unusual although now in that social class it would be quite strange I think. But property was cheaper then and mens' salaries might still have been expected to support a family, so it was probably easier to have kids young.

@AncientQuercus I started full-time work at 16 as well. I laugh at those who say we had all the advantages as we had free university fees, but very few working-class people went. I married DH at 25. He is 2 years older than me. Plenty of working-class friends were already married, but not middle-class friends.
But the age gap was too large between Diana and Charles and people knew it then. But there wasn't the media questioning of the Royal Family at all except in publications like Private Eye. But in mainstream media every female Royal looked beautiful and radiant. Every male Royal was handsome.
I don't remember one piece of media questioning the age gap, but I do remember people commenting on it, either disapprovingly or even in a joky way - but still indicating the age gap was an issue. Most couples were close in age when they got married.

@ladycarlotta The difference was plentiful social housing. That keeps house prices low and keeps rents cheap.

This is really interesting and a friend I met who was brought up in very upper class circles always maintains that the patriarchy is far stronger there. Very traditional male and female relationships persist when they have been changed elsewhere.

Out of my class of 30 only 3 of us went to university in 1983. The rest started work with the rest of our cohort leaving school at 16.

Most were married by the time they were 20. Apart from me (I married later) everyone in my year were married by 24/25 including the ones who’d gone to university.

I come from a long tradition of arranged marriage , most of my female family were married by 20 to men at least 7/8 years older than them.

Omly a few of us went to university from my private school in Newcastle in 1979. Quite a few left at 16 for starters. Those who continued to sixth form did not mostly go to university. 8 went to university, 3 went to become nurses. 3 went to "polytechnics" the school mag says.

On their wedding day Diana had only just turned 20 and Charles was 32. She

Just like Diana’s mother.

I'm slightly older than Diana, 63 now. I went to University and agree with the poster above who stated that marriage was seen by some as anti-feminist. I remember my mother suggesting that I should have "been snapped up" at University. I met a bloke at 21, moved in with him but never married. We're still together.

I remember being deeply cynical about the wedding and yes, it was sold as a fairy tale (with hindsight probably due to the fact that the UK was in deep shit economically). I thought Diana was a simpering idiot and couldn't understand why Charles hadn't married an educated woman (I get now why he married her but I don't think at the time that it was seen as anything other than a love match).

I don't believe it was an arranged match as such but always thought that Lady Fermoy encouraged it as she wanted to remain "in" with the RF. She also gave evidence against her own daughter (Diana's mother) in her divorce case when she left her marriage. Nice.

The "whatever love means" comment by Charles was just something someone with his sense of humour would say - nothing more than that.

Diana was working (after a fashion) with her own flat in London at the time of her engagement, so a fully independent woman with her own life, like many other women of her time.

Did Diana own the flat? I thought it was rented and shared with flatmates? If she did own it it was bought for her. How many 20 year old women could buy a flat , especially on what she was earning as an unqualified nursery assistant. If she had lived with a man I doubt it would have gone down well in her social circles. In general people living together unmarried was normal and unremarkable at the time. However most women still wanted marriage and a family. It was expected that this would happen by 30 at the latest. The patriarchy and womens lib wasn’t a general preoccupation for most ordinary women in my experience.