Marrying a prince is supposed to be a fairy tale. The British royal family shows it’s anything but.

Once upon a time, girls around the world grabbed their favorite tiaras and raced out of bed to see a great love story unfold. A handsome prince plucked a beautiful maiden from her humdrum life and decided she was worthy of being his wife. Her happily ever after was about to begin.

This wasn’t just a fairy tale. To millions, it appeared to be the reality for Princess Diana, Kate Middleton, and Meghan Markle.

They were living the dream so many have had — marrying a prince. But as Kate’s recent Photoshop controversy reveals, there is no “happily ever after” for a British princess.

Bringing the fairy tale to life

Questions about why the British monarchy still exists escalate each year. But Diana, Kate, and Meghan — shimmering modern princesses — have helped the royals maintain relevance.

When a dashing prince marries a “regular” girl, the royal wedding fantasy becomes a reality.

“People love the idea of a fairy tale being a real thing,” royal commentator Kristen Meinzer said. “They love that idea of a girl just being plucked from obscurity and being chosen by someone who could have his pick of the litter. He could date anyone he wanted, he could marry anybody, but he chose her.”

By making the fairy tale feel real, the royal family appears far more accessible — and the British tabloids are more than happy to help.

For instance, a 2006 Daily Mail article praised Kate — whose parents were multi-millionaires when she began dating William — as the “coal miner’s girl” with a “dirt-poor family past” because of her great-great-great-great-grandfather’s occupation. And while the tabloids eventually turned on Meghan, they initially celebrated her for closing her car door or holding an umbrella “over Prince Harry because she’s just a regular woman.”

All three princesses were a boon to the monarchy’s popularity. Diana and Charles’ wedding was watched by 750 million people worldwide. After he said “I do” to Kate, William was praised by former British Prime Minister Sir John Major, who said the public saw him “as a very human individual.” When Harry proposed to Meghan, outlets claimed their union would “breathe new life into an ancient institution.”

Prince William and Kate Middleton at their wedding.Chris Jackson/Getty Images
But, unlike fairy tales, their stories didn’t end after the dream wedding.

“There’s the beauty, the celebration, the joy, the happiness,” Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of folklore and fairy tales, told BI. “And then bang — you’re back to once upon a time, and all the terrible things that happen in once upon a time.”

‘Common’ roots become a vulnerability

With their smiling faces plastered over commemorative cups, the princesses are expected to uphold perfection. They’re celebrated in the tabloids when they fit the “perfect wife” archetype — such as Diana and Kate stepping out just a day after giving birth — and punished when they rebel against it. Any time a princess breaks “royal protocol,” it’s deemed newsworthy, from Kate painting her nails to Diana’s “revenge dress.” Even Meghan, who hasn’t been a senior royal in four years, is still accused of “breaking protocol.”

Kate Middleton and Prince William with their newborn son Prince George in July 2013.ANDREW COWIE/AFP via Getty Images
The model for Kate and Meghan is even narrower than it was for Diana, as the media expects them to match the beloved “People’s Princess.” Countless articles praise the pair when they wear Diana’s jewelry or mirror moments from her life. In his 2023 book “Endgame,” royal expert Omid Scobie wrote that William and Kate were instructed to emulate Diana in public whenever possible, and staffers went to great lengths to style both Kate and Meghan in outfits that looked like hers.

William and Harry watched their wives get picked apart by the tabloids whenever they deviated from Diana, yet she was also a prime target of their negative press.

Kate Middleton and Pippa Middleton in 2007.Niki Nikolova/FilmMagic/Getty Images
While the princes were hailed for foregoing blue-blooded brides, Kate and Meghan’s upbringings were also used against them. As Kate became a fixture of the tabloids, so did the narrative that she had always set her sights on marrying up. The rags were happy to discuss how she and her sister Pippa were known as the “Wisteria Sisters,” climbing the social ladder as fast as the invasive plant.

Meanwhile, the tabloids’ coverage of Meghan’s roots was marked with racist undertones. One 2016 Daily Mail headline proclaimed she was “(almost) straight outta Compton,” while another story described her mother as a “dreadlocked African-American lady from the wrong side of the tracks.” The insults have continued to follow Meghan over the years, such as when a hacker redirected her foundation’s website to a video of Kanye West singing “Gold Digger.”

Meinzer pointed out the gold-digger stereotype presumes that the man has no free will. British tabloids have been pushing that story about Meghan and Harry since they stepped back from the royal family in January 2020 — it was called “Megxit,” after all. The duchess became “Manipulative Meghan,” and outlets reported she took “total control” of Harry’s life.

There’s an undeniable power that comes with the monarchy’s wealth, which was valued at $28 billion in 2021. But what must a princess give up in exchange for money and status?

“This is what happens when you fall in love with a prince,” Tatar said. “You trade in your voice.”

The cost of marrying a prince

Life in the royal family requires a delicate dance of supporting the monarchy without stealing the spotlight from the crown or heir.

In the 2022 Netflix docuseries “Harry & Meghan,” Meghan spoke of how she transformed her wardrobe and wore muted tones to “blend in” and avoid upstaging anyone else in the family.

PEACEHAVEN, UNITED KINGDOM – OCTOBER 03: (EDITORS NOTE: Retransmission with alternate crop.) Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex make an official visit to the Joff Youth Centre in Peacehaven, Sussex on October 3, 2018 in Peacehaven, United Kingdom. The Duke and Duchess married on May 19th 2018 in Windsor and were conferred The Duke & Duchess of Sussex by The Queen.Chris Jackson/Getty ImagesMore
Likewise, in his 2023 memoir “Spare,” Harry wrote that Charles and Camilla tried to make Kate, born “Catherine,” change the spelling of her name because both of their names started with the letter C. He also said Charles’ press officer berated William’s PR team after Kate planned to visit a tennis club when Charles had a royal engagement.

Kate wasn’t the first princess to feel the wrath of the heir’s jealousy. In her 1995 “Panorama” interview with BBC reporter Martin Bashir, Diana spoke of how the public’s adoration — as illustrated by the couple’s 1983 Australia tour — drove a wedge between them.

“With the media attention came a lot of jealousy,” Diana recalled. “A great deal of complicated situations arose because of that.”

Diana Princess of Wales (1961 – 1997) and Prince Charles in front of Uluru/Ayers Rock near Alice Springs, Australia during the Royal Tour of Australia, 21st March 1983. Diana is wearing a dress designed by Benny Ong.David Levenson/Getty Images
Meghan and Harry’s royal tour of Australia 35 years later stirred up those same bitter feelings among the royal family, the prince recalled in “Harry & Meghan.”

“The issue is when someone who’s marrying in, who should be a supporting act, is then stealing the limelight or is doing the job better than the person who was born to do this — it upsets people, it shifts the balance,” Harry said.

It wasn’t long before the tabloids’ narrative of Meghan — once called the “Duchess of Success” — started to turn.

Silence is expected

When Meghan began dating Harry, she received one of her first mandates from the royal family, a motto long embraced by the monarchy — “never complain, never explain.”

“I’ve advocated for so long for women to use their voice, and then I was silent,” Meghan told Oprah Winfrey in 2021.

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry in their interview with Oprah Winfrey.Joe Pugliese/Harpo Productions
The “Were you silent, or were you silenced” moment became one of the year’s biggest memes, but it’s also a classic fairy-tale trope. The passive princess reflects the genre’s “notoriously conservative” nature, Tatar said, pointing to princesses like Cinderella and Snow White.

Meghan hoped to regain control of her narrative through her 2021 interview, but she is still relentlessly picked apart by the tabloids. British author Edwin Hayward pointed out that 16 articles were written about her by just one tabloid within 16 hours after news broke of Kate’s cancer diagnosis.

Diana suffered a similar fate following the release of her biography with Andrew Morton and her BBC interview. As British journalist Robert Hardman told Vanity Fair in 1998, the princess thought sharing her story would earn her favor with the press — instead, “it boomeranged.”

Princess Diana.Tim Graham Photo Library/Getty Images
Because she took agency of her story, royal reporters like Piers Morgan thought Diana had “no right to claim privacy.” Morgan uses the same argument in his frequent criticism of Meghan and Harry.

“You can look at Meghan and say she was a victim of the royal family, and the monarchy, and of racism. And you can also say she’s somebody who took control of her life,” Tatar told BI. “But then that can be turned into, ‘Oh, she’s manipulative.'”

Princesses are set up to fail

If a perfect princess should be seen and not heard, her disappearance can throw the entire system haywire, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding Kate’s withdrawal from the public eye in January.

Kate Middleton was diagnosed with cancer.Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images
Speculation peaked when Kate and William released a digitally altered photo of the princess with her children amid her absence. Only Kate took the blame for editing the shot, though it had been originally credited to William, forcing her to deal with the bad press alone. And when she announced her cancer diagnosis the following week, Kate was on her own once again — sharing the news by herself on a park bench.

“It brought up memories of how Diana was treated,” Meinzer told BI. “It seemed to be another moment of, ‘Well, she has to put out another explanation for herself, and he gets to sit this one out.'”

Some social-media users also noted that Kate’s announcement was the first time they’d heard her voice. The “perfect princess” who never stole the spotlight had suddenly been thrust into it to answer for the monarchy’s bad publicity.

Kate Middleton is receiving treatment for cancer.BBC Studios
The great irony of the royal family turning Kate into a scapegoat is that she is among their greatest assets, as were Diana and Meghan. For years, the root of William’s popularity has revolved around his relationship with Kate, from their wedding to their children. And before he was Kate’s husband, the public fell in love with William because he was Diana’s son.

More often than not, the princesses marrying into the royal family earn the public’s loyalty and love, not those born into the monarchy. Yet the royals never seem to learn their lesson, repeating a cycle of blame that, in part, led Diana and Meghan to leave the monarchy altogether.

Even if you try to escape, one doesn’t just stop being a princess. The title and all the attention that comes with it follows you for life.

It’s probably why fairy tales end after “happily ever after.”