I was in London over the weekend for a different kind of wedding celebration. A small group of my best girlfriends and I traveled across the pond for a quick bachelorette get-together in our bride-to-be’s favorite city. We’d planned the party around her birthday, not the royal wedding. In fact, none of us were feeling the “Markle sparkle” at all. We rolled our eyes at the women wearing fascinators to board our overnight flight. We laughed at the shrines to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry that decorated window storefronts around the city. We weren’t there to worship at the feet of British royals or the profitable wedding industry, but I did realize later in the evening, after our arrival, that we were, in some small and accidental way, paying homage to one member of the royal couple and his admirable transformation from club rat to loyal husband.
After settling in at the Sofitel London St. James and having dinner at Spring inside Somerset House, my friends and I went to my favorite place for debauchery and dancing in London. Mahiki is a tiki-themed nightclub that opened in Mayfair in 2006 and attracted celebrity clientele like Rihanna and Lady Gaga. A 20-something Harry was one of Mahiki’s most loyal patrons. When he wasn’t at Boujis in Kensington, he was constantly photographed coming in and out of Mahiki’s bamboo doors, sometimes with former girlfriend Chelsy Davy, other times with brother William and friends (and, yes, with many mystery ladies, too). When I studied abroad in London in 2008, I also discovered the magic of Mahiki, which included a playlist mashing up the Spice Girls and Michael Jackson, a plastic treasure chest filled with Dom Pérignon and a number of fruit-flavored liquors in lieu of bottle service, a handsome crowd, friendly bartenders in Hawaiian shirts, and two dance floors on which you could lose yourself completely. Today, Mahiki has another London location in Kensington, as well as outposts in Dubai and Marbella, Spain.
We’d read the rumors just days earlier that Harry was planning to model his wedding after-party on Mahiki’s interior, bringing in the DJ and all of its specialty cocktails, so our being there felt serendipitous. The last time I visited Mahiki, it was my 25th birthday. Coming back on the eve of the royal wedding as a 31-year-old, I felt some guilt for continuing to indulge in Windex-blue shots and jumping up and down like a sorority girl to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” Harry was growing up, but was I? In that moment, though, it didn’t matter, and I partied on in the spirit of pre–Markle sparkle Harry. We cut ourselves off around 2:30 a.m. and realized that, thanks to Mahiki, our bachelorette weekend had turned into a symbolic bachelor party for the reformed young prince.
The naughty redhead Harry we all once knew fizzled off into oblivion on Saturday afternoon with the utterance of six words caught on camera: “You look amazing. I’m so lucky.” A million hearts melted and many were crushed knowing that one of the world’s most eligible bachelors wasn’t just off the market, but madly in love with his wife-to-be, too. I have never been a royalist, nor do I get particularly psyched over weddings in general, having been to more than 12 in the past two and a half years, but the nuptials in Windsor were undeniably moving. My friends and I ended up watching on our iPhones while recovering from our Mahiki haze over brunch on the rooftop at the Ned. We witnessed Harry’s rebellious streak morph into a sweetly defiant moment for the royal family, not only because he married a divorced, biracial American actress, but because of the profound words spoken in the chapel by a black preacher from Chicago, the local gospel choir singing “Stand by Me,” and a general feeling of inclusion and unpretentiousness that the British monarchy doesn’t often display.
But we should remember that Harry has always done things his own way. While I am admittedly still smitten by his grand show of adoration to the new Duchess of Sussex on Saturday, part of me was pining for the old days of seeing his hard-partying baby face in tabloid photographs outside of some of London’s biggest nightclubs. He will probably still enjoy a few cocktails from time to time, and he will probably keep dancing to songs by, say, his ex Ellie Goulding like a mad man—the royal reception apparently included a dance-off; a beer pong tournament (Serena Williams won); and a tequila bar manned by Mr. Casamigos himself, George Clooney. For me, my homecoming to Mahiki was a reminder that entering adulthood and getting married doesn’t mean you have to lose that wild streak. You can be a grown-up and still enjoy drinking a fructose-filled concoction out of a tiki glass and, as the royal wedding proved many times over, you can still be a onetime wild-child prince who falls in love on his own terms.