Whenever someone says they don’t like Meghan Markle, one of the main reasons they give (besides the racism, you know) is that they find her disingenuous. They will often point to Markle’s claim that she didn’t Google Prince Harry before their first date as ‘proof’ of this. Everyone does a cursory Google before meeting someone new, they insist, even if by ‘everyone’ they mean ‘me and my friends’, and that’s all the evidence I need that this woman I’ve never met is a duplicitous liar, thank you very much.
In fairness, straight women in particular have been known to channel their inner Harriet the Spy once they’ve agreed to meet a new guy. One of my best friends is able to track people down armed with just a first name and a blurry profile photo taken on an iPhone 8; it’s impressive and terrifying. Much of this is to do with safety concerns – a man asked if I wanted to go hiking in the Dublin mountains as a first date, and my instinctive reaction was to reply SO YOU CAN MURDER ME AND BURY MY BODY THERE, YES? He seemed lovely – #NotAllDublinMountainsEnthusiasts – yet to no one’s surprise but his, I turned down the offer. But I believe Meghan Markle when she said that she didn’t Google her future husband before they met (“I just didn't feel a need,” she said in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, “because everything that I needed to know, he was sharing with me, right? Everything that we thought I needed to know, he was telling me.") is because I do the same. Over the course of 2014- 2016, I dated a couple of men who had jobs that put them in the public eye. And very early on in both of those situations, I made a conscious decision not to Google those men. The reason for this was