Surely only the most Stepford among us can be experiencing anything other than relief for Kate Middleton as she steps out of the House of Windsor’s Disney dystopia and back to the day job?

Like an episode of The Twilight Zone, her image is evaporating off mugs and tea towels to be replaced by less tangible, but no less substantial offerings: privacy, offspring with uncharted futures, and the opportunity to mess up unscrutinised.

Royal marital status, sexuality and fecundity have traditionally obsessed us because that, after all, is what monarchy is there for: links in a chain ultimately significant only in their capacity as products or generators of further links.

Moreover, the issue of royal hitching has been more controversial – witness the anxiety generated by the conjugal careers, or lack thereof, of Elizabeth I, George IV, or Edward VIII. However, never before has the subject been the repository for such antithetical cultural impulses. Marriage has become the battle ground for society’s contradictory beliefs that royalty should be like us and not like us, real and surreal, normal and abnormal all at once.

The majority of us maraud through prolonged, 20-year adolescences in which a degree of bed-hopping is seen as the guarantee of maturity, sexual naivety a hostage to fortune. And, yet, still we demand of our royals both the newfangled talent of emotional intelligence, together with all the old patter about duty, rectitude, and the ability to look good in a hat.

Characteristics that we deem too anachronistic to stomach ourselves, we blithely inflict upon royalty, and then berate the poor blighters for living in the past.

In the past, of course, matters would have been got around with subterfuge, and the heir and the spare equipped with sympathetic mistresses until the appropriate sacrificial virgin could be found. These days, we find such arrangements distasteful, and the stuff of Kitty Kelley biographies. So, no, they must have girlfriends and girlfriends must prematurely mutate into fianceés and the whole sorry business start again.

How is it that so many acolytes of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her many perceived slights, were content to create a second Diana in Ms Middleton: a slightly older, only slightly more worldly, no less starry-eyed incarnation of the old “Lady Di”, complete with an identical “one day my prince will come” fixation?

Bodyguards take note: bedroom walls adorned with House of Windsor beefcakery should immediately disqualify any prospective Williamophile from even brushing shoulders with their idol at Boujis. Future inamoratas should love the heir apparent’s heir apparent in spite of his destiny, not because of it.

By and large, marrying at, or in advance of, one’s quarter century is a fate that society reserves for its most over -or under-privileged; plus a few self-selecting fundamentalists for whom intercourse can only take place within wedlock’s bounds. The rest of us take the plunge a decade later: an average age of 33½ for British brides, and a positively jaded 36 for their grooms.

Should Prince William wait until the age of 30 to tie the knot, as he has professed to desire, then he will still be something of a conjugal early adopter. Meanwhile, “normal” should not merely entail the token attributes of gap years and training shoes. It should mean living a little, having his heart broken and laying down a few regrets. Normality must be allowed to apply to matters of the heart and, indeed, the trouser.