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.

She was renting with flatmates. She was not living only on her salary.

@antelopevalley

She didn’t rent. She owned the apartment, it had been bought by her family for her and she charged her friends rent to live there.

Some were punks but equally lots did marry at a young age. You not knowing those people doesn't mean it didn't happen, I'm a little younger but could probably think of easily a dozen people I know who married under 21

After the engagement interview it was certainly talked about that Charles wasn't entering a love match.

So completely unrepresentative of an ordinary woman’s life. She wasn’t living an independent emancipated life. She was living in a property bought for her by her wealthy parents , doing a low level unchallenging job.

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

Tbh I always saw it as that as well.

He was never going to say that he loved her even if he did imo!

@StartupRepair That's the saddest thing about it, no one seemed bothered about whether it would suit Diana at all. 😞

A PP compared Kate to Diana upthread and said that her quiet, dutiful behavior has given the RF what they want. The key difference is that Kate has actively chosen her husband and her role, she wasn't a naive 19/20-year-old.

I lived this, I remember the interviews and the papers. She looked happy, she admitted she fancied Charles and wanted to be a princess. She was very shy and looked at Charles with love in her eyes.
Lots of marriages fail, so when 3 out of 4 of the Queens children are divorced maybe it wasn't as premeditated as you now feel with hindsight.

She was living the kind of life so many young women in her social circle would have been living.

And she was the first to admit she wasn’t an academic. That she liked being with children and working with them.

It is what it is.

Did they! That's insane.

Exactly. They knew the score, and so did she.

Most of those meetings, they were not alone either.

She was 19, very naive and with very little experience of the world. She thought they would fall in love.

No he was being an arsehole. Even at the time people thought wtf.

Yes he absolutely was being an arsehole, a patronising privileged little arsehole.

My sil was 18 when she was introduced to BIL. (He’s 10 years older) They were engaged after the fourth chaperoned meeting- as she now says ‘well it wasn’t love was it’ & knew that at the time.

My mum was 17, dad was 7 years older. Neither had a say.

Most of my relatives, including myself, all had arranged marriages.

If Diana didn’t understand what that meant then that’s down to her family.

I was the same age as Diana, at uni, and watched the wedding with horror. Thought she was a sacrificial lamb. He seems also very middle-aged and came out with all that toss about whatever love means

@MissMarpleRocks I married into a society where arranged marriages are par for the course though more and more people are now deciding on a love match.

I think the problem was that Diana didn't even have an arranged marriage, which I know can be very successful and happy marriages. Her marriage was one of convenience but I suspect she didn’t actually know and no-one bothered to tell her.

Charles did not even seem like a young 32, he did seem middle-aged.

I actually saw him in 1981. He was opening something or visiting something in the street where I was working. I was surprised by how attractive he was in the flesh. I was very close to him in a small group.

Diana was an older looking nineteen year old so it never seemed as shocking as it actually could have. She only started growing up in the last few years of her life.

Gosh I thought she looked like a child at 19/20, not mature at all.

She was baby faced and looked very naive to me.

Out of curiosity, did those marriages work?

She would undoubtedly had a gynaecology exam to ascertain
she was capable of reproducing.

Her father confirmed it by going on TV to announce she was a perfect specimen.

This was how she looked at the time.