loonytick
Courtier
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2016
- Messages
- 755
- City
- Tennessee
- Country
- United States
Let's put it another way, would Americans be happy to have a first lady who has never lived or worked in the US? Melania Trump is certainly not to my taste but at least she lived & worked in the US for a number of years prior to when her husband became president.
That's a strange example. First Ladies, for the most part, have been married to their spouse for years before becoming First Lady, and you don't win the Presidency without having been in the nation to first build a reputation and connections and then campaign for at least a year or two. But if an unmarried person were to become
President and then marry a foreigner while in office, I don't think the fact that the new spouse was not American would be the surprising or uncomfortable thing. I think people would mostly just be taken aback to find that the President had carved out enough free time to conduct an international romance. We don't really have many expectations for a First Lady, but we do seem to expect the President to be a workaholic.
If you look at some of the other foreign spouses of other royal houses like Princess Mary, she lived in Denmark for a year or so before an engagement was announced.
Mary did, but Alexandra and Marie didn't move to Denmark until their engagements were announced. It's a nice step for a couple to be able to make if the girlfriend's job can be transferred to the country (giving not only an income but a reason for the visa in the time until the engagement becomes official), but it's not always possible. Until fairly recently, royal brides rarely came from the nation they would come to represent and weren't expected to be in that nation until it was time for their wedding.
Being neither British nor a resident of the UK, I'm certainly in no position to take the temperature of the public and how Brexit might color opinion of a foreign royal fiancee. I will say that it seems beyond illogical to me to simultaneously (a) embrace the concept of monarchy/royalty and (b) essentially expect to have anyone marrying into a royal family be the perfect choice for the public from day one. Either you buy into the idea that a family--which is made up of people and marriages that have to work on a personal level in order to work at all--play this role in your nation or you use only with appointed/elected/hired staff to do the job of representing you. If the model is monarchy, then sometimes the public is just going to have to sometimes make its peace with letting people grow into the job rather than be ready for it the moment they become a part of the family. And when it comes to spouses, that sometimes means going ahead and assigning RPO's, providing housing, etc. for British citizens who have never dealt with the public and won't be immediately ready for a full schedule of walkabouts or speech-making and sometimes it will mean providing those resources for foreigners who haven't established themselves as British.
If a member of the royal family (Harry) is ready to get married to that person (Meghan) and the Queen is ok with it then it's time for it to happen, whether Joe Q. Public likes it or not. That's just part of what you get when with a monarchy.
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