Just hours after Prince William and Kate Middleton broke with royal convention by taking to social media to share a peck on the cheek to mark Valentine’s Day, Meghan Markle decided to show them how it’s really done.
In an arty black-and-white snap brimming with passion, Meghan showed herself locking lips with Prince Harry over a glass of wine and lunch. Both had their eyes closed and looked lost in sensual delight.
The contrast with William’s chaste cheek kiss on Kate could not have been more stark. While the future king and queen’s display of love barely registered a flicker on the romance Richter scale, Meghan’s full-on smooch screamed, quite simply, of the need to get a room.
If Meghan was throwing shade at the British royals’ approach to public displays of affection, it wouldn’t be the first time. She previously declared herself a “hugger”—a habit, she claimed, which made Kate recoil in horror when she went in for a physical greeting. And who among us could forget the infamous lip gloss moment: Harry strongly implied in his memoir Spare that Kate was too uptight to share a dab of lip balm with Meghan.
By that reading, today’s Valentine’s Day smackdown between the Sussexes and the Waleses is just another chapter in the ongoing saga of their transatlantic rivalry. While both camps insist they don’t want to be pitted against each other, they somehow manage to keep feeding the comparisons.
Team William will say his photo is classy, restrained, and befitting a future king. His critics might argue that his picture is a portrait of repression, stiff-upper-lip syndrome in full effect.
Meghan’s critics will no doubt accuse her of using moody black-and-white photography to make herself look intellectual, artistic—and just a little bit superior to square old Kate.
One thing’s for certain—love is in the air, no matter how it’s expressed.
