This past spring, there was a whole gossip storyline fueled by Dan Wakeford, a former People Mag and Us Weekly editor. Wakeford was shilling his new subscription Substack, and he was trying to build his subscriber base off of the deranged community. Wakeford claimed that his sources were telling him that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were “wildly unhappy” with each other and with their life in Montecito. Something about how Harry would prefer to live in Montana, and how Harry’s misery was affecting the Sussex marriage. In retrospect, given the Sussex family’s move to the UK, I think there was something to the gossip around “Prince Harry is bored of Montecito and he wants to get out of California.” Well, Wakeford is back and he’s still ringing the “wildly unhappy” bell.

A top royal insider has blown the lid off why Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are “wildly unhappy.” Dan Wakeford, a cultural commentator and founder of the Celebrity Intelligence newsletter, tells The Royalist’s Tom Sykes that the Sussexes were miserable living in California and that their conflicting passions complicate their relationship.

“The ‘wildly unhappy’ came not from within their relationship in their life right now,” the former People and Us Weekly editor-in-chief said, referring to an article published in Celebrity Intelligence in April. “It was their life in America they were wildly unhappy about…They were wildly unhappy with how things had gone, and they hadn’t gone how they expected. I don’t think they could find—think of a way out of that. And so it’s very interesting.”

Wakeford said the couple’s move back to the United Kingdom has helped to make Harry happier, but he does not believe it has done the same for the Los Angeles-native Meghan.

“The problem with this couple is you have two people with completely different goals in life and geographical, like, homes,” he explained. Wakeford said that, according to his sources and other reporting, the two are “very much in love,” but they butt heads over what makes them truly happy.

“They’re not on the same page with where they’re going in life, whether that’s living in England or living in America, whether that is philanthropy or a glamorous Hollywood lifestyle brand,” he said. “And so doing that as a couple—they oppose each other, really, of what to their core, makes them happy and their reasons for being.”

Sykes noted that relationships, even between two people who are “very much in love,” can falter when their goals are not aligned.

“I think we’ve all seen plenty of people who are madly in love and carried away with the whole thing who can’t make it work as a relationship, because the relationship is a very different kind of thing,” Sykes said.

Wakeford agreed, saying their different goals make it hard for them to be happy and “power forward and be on the same page…I mean, from the moment Meghan entered into the royal family, it was obvious that she was naive to the understanding of the structure and what was expected from the royal family and felt that she could change that,” he said. “And that was incredibly frustrating for her…Obviously it’s easier for her now that she’s not in the royal family, but to me, I don’t see their goals and their aspirations and what gives them their reasons to live individually don’t necessarily marry together, to result in a happy and easy life.”

[From The Daily Beast]

To me, this kind of hand-wringing over “where will they build their life longterm” is idiotic because they’ve already been together for a decade and they’ve figured out ways to make it work internationally, even if that means Harry moving his wife and children to a country which is extremely dangerous for them. Harry and Meghan have always prioritized their marriage above everything, and that’s clearly what Meghan has done this year as well – she made this move for Harry, because this is what he wants and where he wants to be. And I think everyone has their fingers crossed that this stupid UK adventure is over by next summer. If it’s not… well, then maybe I’ll believe that someone is “wildly unhappy.”

Photos courtesy of Instar, Backgrid, Cover Images. Cover courtesy of The Sun.