One of the biggest social media frenzies of conspiracy theorizing and innuendo in recent memory was the furor around the whereabouts and well-being of Kate Middleton. After Kate’s announcement of her cancer diagnosis, there should be a moment of reflection, including how and why Lady Rose Hanbury was dragged into the fervor by being incorrectly labeled as “the other woman” in an unsubstantiated affair with Prince William. Why did Rose immediately become a target of ire and fascination? Our Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist spoke with Business Insider about how people’s fixations with infidelity, true or not, speaks to anxieties about relationships and why women like Rose frequently take the blame.
In “People Were Quick to Label Rose Hanbury the ‘Other Woman.’ It Says More About Their Own Insecurities Than the Royals, Therapists Said,” Matt observes that gossip about celebrity affairs relates to “our own anxieties about what we fear could or might be going on in our own relationships…” These affairs spark fears that we could be secure in our relationships and suddenly discover that we’re not. This includes a “primitive” fear of not being a “desirable” enough partner.
While not in the article, the truth is relationships are scary. Monogamy is precarious despite so much effort to make it otherwise. There has always been ambivalence around the traditional structure of the family, on which much is built. Women are especially vulnerable in the traditional family structure, both financially and operationally; children also depend on it. However, that exists in contrast to its very real limits and flaws. This is not to say non-monogamy should be the model for every couple (though it works out for some). It means fidelity, like any part of life, is risky and uncertain. Yet we’ve built a whole world upon it that carries a certain heavy emotional burden largely tolerated by virtue of the strategy of denial. So when fidelity cracks culturally like, for instance, Charles betraying Diana or the rumor about Prince William and Rose Hanbury, we project all of that gravity and fear onto it. As Matt says in Business Insider, “It evokes this idea of, ‘Gosh, I was going along thinking everything with my partner was fine, but I thought everything with William and Kate was fine.’”
Women too frequently bear the burden of holding together society’s expectations about both sex and family. When those expectations fail, as they inevitably do, our culture blames women. Hence, the misogynistic trope of “the other woman” who is seen, Matt notes, as “sneaky” and “conniving.” The way we assign moral blame in these cases is a function of something called splitting: to preserve an idea of a partner as good, we assign more blame than is fair to the “other” (usually) woman.
In contrast, very often the man is seen as, Matt reveals, “not responsible for his decision-making in that process.” This plays out publicly with women like Camilla or Rose Hanbury becoming “bad objects,” as well as privately. “You hear a lot about the mom at the elementary school that gets scorned at drop-off because she’s had some kind of role in something like this,” Matt says. “It can be some real unkindness.”
