AMANDA PLATELL: My warning to Meghan: If you want your marriage to last, don’t turn Harry into a ‘plus one’

Decades after the end of my marriage, there’s a question I still ask myself.

When my then husband John told me that he was “sick of living in my shadow”, why did I not show him more empathy?

Instead, I said cruelly: “Then why don’t you try casting one of your own?”

Ouch! My words must have been particularly cutting because we were both journalists, but while my career unexpectedly soared – through luck, grit and long hours – his began to dwindle.

He was spending more time in the pub than in the office, and less and less with me.

The more successful I became, the more resentful and withdrawn he became, and the more I stopped seeing him as the magnificent man and loving partner he once was.

I didn’t put him first and, most tragically, I lost sight of him as my lover – so he found another.

I was devastated when I discovered he was having an affair with a younger woman.

And furious, not just about the betrayal but his inability to man up and be proud of what I’d achieved, what I thought we’d achieved together.

Both were understandable sentiments.

But looking back, I can see that I was so full of righteous indignation that I failed to see the part I had played in our demise.

Namely that, preoccupied by my own ascent, I’d unwittingly relegated my rock and my stay to the subsidiary role of my “plus one”.

He was no longer a name in his own right, he was merely the “other” guest invited alongside me to grand events.

Whenever we went to the Royal Opera House, to Bruce Springsteen concerts, gala newspaper events, dinners with friends, I was always the centre of attention.

And this was some fall from grace for John, a former newspaper executive who’d also been the centre of my world in the early days of our relationship.

These memories came flooding back after reading headlines mocking Prince Harry for being nothing more than his fabulous wife’s “plus one”.

For months now, rumours have circulated that all might not be paradise inside the Sussexes’ £12 million (AUD$23m) Montecito mansion.

That a miserable looking Harry increasingly cuts a forlorn figure, playing second fiddle to the magnificent Meghan.

During their two faux royal tours to Nigeria and Colombia earlier this year, he was very much the sideshow.

Barely two years after he portrayed himself as the forgotten Spare in his vengefest book of the same name, is Prince Harry in danger of becoming a spare part in his own marriage, too?

Despite her unpopularity in the UK, Meghan has managed to establish herself on the celebrity circuit in the States, turning up unexpectedly at the LA Children’s Hospital Gala this week, greeting children, dressed in showstopping red and posing for snaps shared worldwide – while Harry was alone in southern Africa, where he had travelled to visit the charity he cofounded in Lesotho.

He also spent the night of his 40th birthday recently hiking with his mates rather than with his wife and two children, something I fear should ring alarm bells in any marriage.

Yet Meghan even took ownership of that trip, saying it was her gift to him, seemingly having the effect of deliberately or inadvertently emasculating him again.

As someone who once made similar mistakes, mine is a cautionary tale.

When my marriage hit crisis point, my husband didn’t go on hiking trips, he was just increasingly missing in action, never wanting to be around when my parents or friends visited, increasingly off on his own… or, as I later discovered, with his mistress.

Of course I am not comparing the unexpected, minor celebrity status I attained early on in my marriage to that of Meghan.

And yet as the girl from Applecreek, in Perth, Australia, who became an overnight success, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find all the attention intoxicating.

After all, I was earning a fortune, had been labelled “one to watch” by a host of magazines and newspapers, appeared on the BBC’s Question Time and was described as one of the most powerful women in Britain.

Such a far cry from my humble beginnings.

Before we married, on the other hand, John was incredibly successful as the showbiz editor of the Sydney Sun newspaper.

In the early 1980s, I’d just landed a job working for the provincial Perth Daily News as their Sydney bureau chief.

A grand title which amounted to me and a tickertape machine in a tiny office in the bowels of the building.

We met on a Friday night in the journalists’ pub near our offices.

At 6ft 2in, he was dark, brooding and more handsome than any man has a right to be; clever, too, and funny.

That night he invited me to a Hall & Oates concert he had tickets to.

The first time he kissed me was when they sang their hit Kiss On My List, including the lyrics, “Your kiss is on my list of the best things in life.”

Much more kissing ensued, he proposed in the tiny kitchen of the flat we later shared and we wed in 1985 in Sydney.

I couldn’t believe a fabulous guy like him would want to be with a girl like me. But he did.

We decided to celebrate our marriage by having an adventure, backpacking across the world to London, which was one of the happiest times of my life.

We lived on five Aussie dollars a day (about £2), just the two of us with one change of clothing, in seventh heaven away from everything.

We arrived in the UK with only £150 (AUD$291), intending to stay for as long as it took us to earn the cost of the flights home.

Then the plan was to buy a home in Sydney and have a family – five kids, to be precise. My dream was to be a stay at home mum.

Almost immediately, though, John got a great job in London while I took casual shifts on newspapers like the Observer and the Sunday Express (I later went on to become the editor of the latter).

We shared a minuscule flat in Islington, north London, with another Aussie couple and loved our new life.

Still young, getting around to having kids didn’t seem a pressing concern at that point.

I was offered a junior job on Today, the first fully digital colour newspaper, and my life changed for ever.

Within a year, aged 28, I’d been promoted to deputy editor.

Soon newspapers were writing about this glamorous, powerful Aussie from nowhere; a TV show, unkindly named Killer Bimbos Of Fleet Street, was even made about me and other successful newspaper women.

Meanwhile, John wasn’t finding much joy in his work.

Though initially supportive and proud of me, I soon noticed that while I’d be working until midnight, he’d be in the pub by 6pm.

The sad truth for any career woman is that an alpha male becomes less attractive, both emotionally and perhaps more importantly sexually, once he’s lost his drive… when you’re greeted at the end of a long day by him lying on the sofa demanding, “What’s for dinner?”

I knew we were drifting apart but didn’t for the life of me know how to fix us.

Then, just four years into our marriage, the bombshell landed.

A colleague gleefully told me in front of an office full of people that my husband was having an affair.

When I confronted him that night, he said it was a “cry for help”.

I cried too, then contacted the most expensive divorce lawyers I could find, and suggested he spend some time with his best friend in LA.

The moment he left, I changed the locks.

To be honest, I’d never once considered how he felt about our change in dynamic.

The fact that the girl he had married was eclipsing him – this formerly proud man. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that I might have inadvertently made him feel worthless, while his mistress made him feel so invincible she couldn’t get through a day without him.

Naively, I thought he’d be proud of my success.

I never considered how my working so hard and so late made me a part-time wife.

Yet I’m certainly not the only woman to have married a “prince” only for him to turn back into a frog when the power balance of the relationship shifted in ways they hadn’t predicted.

Many of my girlfriends found their marriages failed once their careers took off.

And now I fear that Meghan is making the same mistake – emasculating a once proud man.

After all, Meghan fell in love with a Prince of the Realm, an Apache-flying hero. Now she’s supposed to want to rip his clothes off as he collects free-range eggs from their chickens?

Unsurprisingly, these days Harry is often seen alone sipping coffee made with organic milk in the couple’s local cafe.

Whether we like it or not, there’s still this ingrained belief in most men that they should be the breadwinners.

Not that they’re against female equality, but we know that many men think badly of themselves if they lose the role of hunter-gatherer.

And what they see as failure may lead them to look for other ways to repair their battered ego.In John’s case, that meant falling into the arms of another woman.

So what’s the solution?

It’s certainly not for women to rein in their own talent, ambitions or success. Why should a wife become less to make her husband feel more?

It’s not a case of giving up your dreams either.

It’s more about remembering the dreams you had together, and keeping in view the fact that you are sharing a life – there has to be give and take.

Remember the importance of talking about problems – and the fact that great sex is always hugely important no matter how busy you are.

Swallow your pride, make him feel as important as he actually is to you.

And above all, learn from my example by never allowing your partner to feel like he’s a mere plus one in your life.

That said, the man must stand up to the task, too.

It doesn’t matter how much he earns, it’s the dignity he gets from his work and his determination to make the marriage work that count.

After all, no one can make you a plus one if you don’t let them.