Today, let love rule

THE nerves rattling through Prince Harry and Meghan Markle must be astronomical. Today they will wed and profess their love while pledging to stay together for the rest of their lives — before hundreds of millions of TV witnesses and, depending on your belief, before God.

Their every twitch, step and word will be scrutinised.

Every garment they don, every morsel they eat, each hand they shake and every bow of their heads will be commented on.

If nerves are a continuum between anxiety and terror, I suspect Meghan, who has known a life without fame and fortune, is verging on panic.

Harry only knows life as the focus of a camera lens but I suspect today will surpass anything even he has experienced. I wish them the best. I thank them for making love, on this auspicious day, the biggest news story in Western world — a relief from the tragedy in Gaza, the threat of the Korean peninsula, the insanity of US politics, the hell in Syria and the terror in Indonesia.

For a moment the horror, for us at least, may be lifted by love.

But I fear for Harry and Meghan.

I can’t help but remember when an old friend once walked me through the pages of her wedding album. I stopped to giggle at the fright on her face in one photograph of her walking down the aisle and, with a sorrowful face, she confessed the camera’s shutter had caught the harrowing moment she realised beyond doubt she did not want to wed.

She explained that she had accepted her husband’s proposal in an instant of joy and had been too scared, too pressured by excited family and friends, and too unwilling to break a heart to put a stop to the wedding as the day approached.

On the arm of her father, drifting down the aisle, the truth hit like lightning, but she pushed on, smiling and laughing as if in a dream.

Six months later she was separated, to be divorced, and that was how she ended up in a share house with me, sheltering from the fallout as family and friends took sides in a dispute that should only have concerned two people, both of whom were honest, caring and innocent.

She survived this torrid wake for love, and married again years later.

It’s not an uncommon story. In Australia, one in three marriages end in divorce, and there are more than 300 weddings every day.

The pain of these breakups will pale against what is in store if Harry and Meghan fail to tie the knot tight enough.

Having invited the media in, they will have little chance of asking them to leave.

Everything will be public. Where there are no facts, they will be invented. Where there are rumours, fractures and smoke there will be motordrives and flashes.

I can’t help but think of Harry’s mum.

Maybe the young lovers should have tiptoed off alone to a secret forest grotto and gazed long into each other’s eyes to make their vows. Then again, maybe their very public love will triumph and they will live happily ever after.

Paul Simon’s song Hearts and Bones is about such affairs of the heart. He wrote it about Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia in Star Wars. They had a tumultuous relationship and married just before the song’s 1983 release, then split up as they had many times before being married.

“Thinking back to the season before, looking back through the cracks in the door,” Simon wrote in a reference I suspect is about the marriage of Diana and Charles in 1981. “Two people were married, the act was outrageous, the bride was contagious. She burned like a bride.

“These events may have had some effect on the man with the girl by his side. The arc of a love affair. His hands rolling down her hair. Love like lightning shaking till it moans.”

Inspired by Diana’s wedding, Fisher suggests in the song they get married in Mexico.

“Why don’t we drive through the night, we’ll wake up down in Mexico?” she says, romantically.

“Oh, I don’t know nothin’ about, nothin’ about Mexico,” Simon replies, defensively. “And tell me, why, why won’t you love me for who I am where I am?” Thus, starts the angst. They separate to “resume old acquaintances” and “speculate who has been damaged the most”.

But “the arc of a love affair” is “waiting to be restored” because “you take two bodies and you twirl them into one, their hearts and their bones, and they won’t come undone”.

Just before she died in 2016, Fisher said about Simon, with whom she became lifelong friends: “I do like the songs he wrote about our relationship. Even when he’s insulting me, I like it very much.”

Maybe because they are unnervingly honest.

Keep it real, Harry and Meghan.

Maybe the young lovers should have tiptoed off alone to a secret forest grotto and gazed long into each other’s eyes to make their vows.