Prince Harry reveals the ‘surreal’ thing about start of romance with Meghan Markle
The Duke of Sussex said the occurrence related to the day they started chatting was “uncanny” and “bizarre”. The more romantic of us think that some pairings are just meant to be. Prince Harry seems to be part of that camp as he picked out a “surreal” coincidence about the day he and now wife Meghan Markle started to chat.
The couple first started dating in July 2016 and in his memoir Spare the Prince told readers that he had first become aware of Meghan through a mutual friend’s Instagram story. He asked the mate to put them into contact with each other and what quickly followed was a conversation which lasted hours. It ended with the pair – now the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – arranging to meet up the following evening. But it was only later that he raised the significance of the date of that first online interaction.
He wrote: “It occurred to me how uncanny, how surreal, how bizarre, that this marathon conversation should have begun on July 1, 2016. “My mother’s fifty-fifth birthday.” It was in March 2021 that Harry first made the direct comparison between the experiences of Meghan and his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales, telling Oprah Winfrey that he was terrified his wife would face the same outcome as the People’s Princess.
He reaffirmed the sentiment in the pair’s six-part Netflix documentary series – citing the media intrusion that both women have suffered. But the couple has been criticised for likening Meghan’s experiences to that of Diana. Royal commentator Kinsey Schofield argued the Duchess’ treatment is not comparable to the late Princess’, telling Express.co.uk: “Are dozens of people jumping out of bushes or waiting outside of the gym for a shot of Meghan Markle? “No. Diana had it 1,000x worse than Meghan ever will.”
She continued: “Princess Diana suffered media scrutiny for almost two decades. Harry and Meghan are very litigious. “They clearly document and save everything, yet don’t have any authentic footage of Meghan being hounded by the paparazzi.” However, Ms Schofield conceded that Meghan had been subjected to cruel treatment by the media. She added: “Do I think that some of the media attention towards Meghan has been cruel? I do.”
But Andrew Morton, the author of the famous Princess of Wales biography, Diana: Her True Story, has argued there are many similar “parallels” between the two women’s treatment. The royal biographer explained that both women were regularly targeted by the media and “blamed for everything”.
