“There were loads of feelings still there, feelings I’d suppressed….”
rince Harry spends a lot of time in Spare going into his issues with the royal family, but he also opens up about his past—including his past relationships. So, yeah, if you’ve ever wondered why he and Chelsy Davy broke up, you’re about to find out.
Harry and Chelsy dated on and off from 2004 to 2010, and they first met in South Africa. “One night, we talked about having some people over. For dinner. Just one small problem. We didn’t know anyone in Cape Town,” he wrote, via Just Jared. “But wait, that wasn’t completely true. I’d met someone years earlier, a girl from South Africa. At the Berkshire Polo Club. Chelsy. I remember her being…different.”
“Unlike so many people I knew, she seemed wholly unconcerned with appearances, with propriety, with royalty. Unlike so many girls I met, she wasn’t visibly fitting herself for a crown the moment she shook my hand. She seemed immune to that common affliction sometimes called throne syndrome,” Harry wrote. “I’d always wanted to know what it might be like to meet a woman and not have her eyes widen at the mention of my title but instead to widen them myself, using my mind, my heart. With Chelsy, that seemed a real possibility. Not only was she uninterested in my title, she seemed bored by it. ‘Oh, you’re a prince? Yawn.’”
They spent three days together and then had their “first kiss under the stars.” Despite paparazzi intrusion, Harry and Chelsy got serious—although they had their ups and downs when Harry was in the army. “I recall one difficult chat. What were we doing? Where were we heading?” he writes. “She knew I cared about her. But she felt unseen. I am not visual. She knew how desperate I was to go to war. How could she not forgive my being a bit detached? I was taken aback.”
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They ended up parting ways due to Chelsy not wanting a life in the public but ran into each other at Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding in 2011.
“She and I weren’t in regular touch, which was why Willy checked with me before inviting her to the wedding. He didn’t want either of us to feel uncomfortable,” Harry wrote, saying that seeing her was “hard.” He explained, “There were loads of feelings still there, feelings I’d suppressed, feelings I hadn’t suspected. I also felt a certain way about the hungry-looking men trailing after her, circling her, nagging her to dance. Jealousy got the better of me that night, and I told her so, which made me feel worse. And a bit pathetic.”
These two clearly remained friends despite awkward post-breakup vibes, because Chelsy was in attendance at Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle:
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