This morning’s announcement feels oddly familiar. The first thing I thought about when I heard the news of the engagement was the marriage of Charles and Diana. Let’s hope the happiness that eluded the parents will be attainable by the son and his fiancée.

EPA file (left) / Ben Stansall / AFP - Getty Images (right)

Charles Windsor, Prince of Wales, and his then fiancée Lady Diana Spencer, Feb. 24, 1981, on the day their engagement was announced in the gardens of Buckingham Palace in London. (Right) Prince William and his fiancée Kate Middleton pose for photographers in St. James Palace in London, Nov. 16, 2010, to mark their engagement. Britain's Prince William has given Kate Middleton the engagement ring that belonged to his late mother. The blue sapphire and diamond ring was given to Diana by William's father, Prince Charles, when they became engaged. Charles and Diana divorced in 1996, and she was killed in a car crash in Paris the following year.

Today show slideshow: See the fashionable similarities between Kate and other royal family members.

Newsweek reports that this princess will be different

She looks good on camera, there’s no known scandal in her background, and she’s never acquired a serious profession. So much for the points of similarity. In almost every other respect, Kate Middleton—whose engagement to Prince William was announced today—shares nothing with the last young hopeful to marry an heir to the British throne. And if Diana Spencer’s marriage to the Prince of Wales back in 1981 had the throwback quality of a dynastic union, Kate Middleton’s looks like a very 21st-century affair.

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