Prince William and Kate didn’t get engaged until they’d been together for almost 10 years.
However, one expert has said that this isn’t because he was unsure or had cold feet.
Essentially he asked Kate to “wait 10 years” for one specific reason, earning her the nickname “Waity Katie“.
William and Kate news: Why did he wait so long to propose?
Royal expert Tina Brown told Australia’s Women’s Weekly that William was certain he loved Kate.
However, he needed to make sure she could cope with the realities of royal life, it has been claimed.
“It was because he knew how extraordinarily difficult it was to live in that institution of monarchy, for two reasons,” she claimed.
William understood the stresses. He’d seen his mother crack up from it.
Brown listed one as the “the strictures and constraints and the need to live in this artificial way a lot of the time”.
The second, she claimed, is because “the scrutiny is relentless”.
More than that, she said it will “never end for your entire life”.
Diana’s influence
She claimed that he looked at how his late mother handled being a part of the royal family and learnt from that.
“William understood the stresses. He’d seen his mother crack up from it. He didn’t want his wife to be someone who could not handle that,” she claimed.
William’s brotherly advice to Harry
The row between William and brother Prince Harry ahead of his wedding to Meghan Markle has been well-documented.
It’s claimed William told Harry “you shouldn’t marry Meghan, you should wait”.
However, Brown claimed that he didn’t quite articulate what he meant by that.
“He’s had a lot of flak from Harry, but the people around William told me he only meant to say: ‘Give her more time to understand what she’s getting into.'”
Read more: Harry and Meghan’s exit ‘accelerated’ Cambridge kids’ introduction to the limelight
Indeed, Meghan said in her interview with Oprah: “I had no idea what I was getting into.”
And Brown thinks, like Kate, Meghan would’ve benefitted from having longer to understand “what it would extract from her”.
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