I’m old enough to remember how out-of-touch the royal family was in the 1980s. Yeah, I was just a kid (a toddler for the early 1980s), but I still have vivid memories of the early days of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s marriage. One specific memory: everybody making a big deal about Diana being a virgin when she married Charles. In this age of promise rings and mainstream evangelicalism, it seems like we’ve been talking about virginity for a while, but I think for many people in the 1980s, coming out of the free-love free-for-all of the 1960s and 1970s, talking about Diana’s virginity was a crusty throwback, impossibly dated. But still, it was discussed, and many “traditional” royalists believed that a royal bride must be a virgin on her wedding day. No mention of the royal grooms, by the way.

So why is nobody making a big deal about Kate Middleton’s presumably long-gone virginity? That is the focus on some larger discussions in Britain and America. Kate and William lived together at university, and they’ve been sharing homes, apartments and beds for nine years, on and off. More than that, it’s widely believed that neither Kate nor William were virgins when they got together. In this day and age, does it matter?

The once hidebound royal family seems to have caught up with Britain’s tolerant public in the three decades that separated Prince Charles’ marriage to Diana Spencer from the wedding of their first born.

Few people – royal or otherwise – seem bothered by the fact that Prince William and his fiancee, Kate Middleton, have been living together off and on during the course of their eight-year romance, which began in university days.

That’s a marked turnaround from the days preceding Charles and Diana’s 1981 marriage. At that time, there was a general expectation that Diana would not have dated before her engagement to the heir to the throne, and her own uncle came out publicly to declare her a “bona fide” virgin.

The more modern approach gives many royal watchers hope that William, 28, and Middleton, 29, will fare better in their marriage than Charles and Diana, whose very public marital breakdown tarnished the image of the royal family.

William, said royal expert Dickie Arbiter, is “his own man.”

“He’s made his own space and he decides what he wants to do and when he wants to do it,” Arbiter said. “The fact that William and (Kate) have had a relationship for eight years speaks for itself.”

William’s decision to live with his fiancee has been met, in general, with a shrug. The British public seems comfortable with the royal family having updated its unwritten behavior codes to bring them more in line with widely held social values.

“We live in a modern age and people do all sorts of things before they settle down,” said Keith Morley, 34, an engineer from Birmingham. “It’s probably best that they lived together before making a commitment.”

Some historians say it’s about time the royals shed their prudishness about the past of new entries into their family. When Charles and Diana wed, his history of dating was not an issue. Charles may well have wanted to marry girlfriend Camilla Shand, but she was not seen as an appropriate choice because she had had several previous boyfriends. She became Charles’ second wife decades later.

Deborah Cohen, a historian at Northwestern University in Chicago who specializes in modern Britain, says the failure of Charles and Diana’s marriage apparently convinced the royal family that its rigid standards were backfiring.

“After two decades of scandal, I think it’s the royal family recognizing that to be normal is to their advantage,” she said. “It’s a canny refashioning of the image. There is no longer an investment in being anachronistic, or a public expectation that they ought to be harkening back to a different era of sexual politics.”

Royal attitudes toward sexuality have never been based on fixed rules but rather unwritten conventions. The code of behavior has evolved – slowly – over the centuries as social values change. It is the monarch who sets the tone, so the views of Queen Elizabeth II have prevailed for nearly six decades.

Practical concerns, more than squeamishness about sex, were behind the royal family’s historic concerns over the sexual status of a bride joining the royal family, Cohen said, because there were fears that a princess carrying another man’s child could bring an illegitimate heir to the throne. This was particularly important before paternity testing.

By Diana’s time, Cohen said, the issue had come to represent a yearning for lost innocence as Britain – with Europe’s highest divorce rate – was gripped by a perceived social breakdown.

A spokesman for Prince William, who refused to be identified because of royal policy, said palace officials would not comment on whether attitudes have changed, preferring to leave that role to others.

[From Huffington Post]

Personally, I think it makes for a stronger relationship and marriage when you know you are sexually compatible, and I don’t have a problem with William and Kate’s sexual relationship, nor do I have a problem with Kate *gasp* having previous lovers before William. That being said, I think this HuffPo piece doesn’t bring up one of the main reasons why the royal family seems so “stuffy” about these things – they are technically the “defenders of the faith” of the Church of England. While they are not members of the clergy, a member of the royal family “living in sin” and having a premarital sexual relationship is still verboten, technically speaking. Religious slut-shaming! But whatever. My biggest problem is that people tended to expect virginity from the brides, but the male royals were expected to “sow their royal oats.”

Oh, and here’s an interesting tidbit: Kate Middleton invited two of her ex-lovers to the wedding! William invited four of his exes. Sluts.

Photos courtesy of WENN.