The Prince left "dealing with Diana to others" and went to roam around the estate on his own.
"Perfect marriage" might be true for many but for some, it's still an idea that they couldn't apply in their personal lives. You may have come across or even personally experienced unions where it looks all perfect but in reality, it isn't a fairytale. The same was for Princess Diana and Prince Charles.
Though for the world they were an ideal couple, the roots of their marriage were bejeweled with betrayal, miscommunication, unhappiness, and even dissatisfaction. However, the couple didn't take long to come to the conclusion that maybe, tying the knot wasn't the best decision they had made.
Diana was just 20 years old when she married Prince Charles who was 12 years her senior. Everything seemed to have happened in a hurry for them. Just after 13 meetings, they got engaged, and five months later, married. They never got to explore what kind of people they were beyond their initial meetings and within the first few days of their union, cracks began to appear in their relationship which would only get worse in the coming years.
As the couple left for their honeymoon in the Royal Yacht Britannia, they perceived the coming storm. According to royal author Penny Junor, who wrote the 2017 biography, The Duchess: The Untold Story, "It was a disaster, and only served to demonstrate how very little they had in common," as per Express UK.
Elaborating on how different Diana and Prince Charles were as individuals, she penned, "The Prince envisaged a wonderful holiday in the sun, swimming, reading, painting, and writing thank-you letters. He had taken his watercolors and some canvases and a pile of books by Laurens van der Post, which he’d hoped they might share and discuss in the evenings."
The Princess, however, was someone who preferred talking over books. Their chemistry was so off that she even got "offended" by the way Prince Charles was spending his time.
Junor wrote, "Diana was no reader and was offended that he should prefer to bury his head in a book rather than sit and talk to her. She hated his wretched books. She resented him sitting for hours at his easel, too, and they had many blazing rows."
Diana wasn't the one to bear it for too long. "One day when he was sitting painting on the veranda deck, he went off to look at something for half an hour. He came back to find she had destroyed the whole lot... He had no idea what was wrong," revealed the author in her book.
While the Prince was "bewildered," Diana was obviously upset about the whole thing. They then went to the Queen's Scottish estate, Balmoral Castle, where Diana told the press she was having a "lovely" time. She said, "Balmoral is one of the best places in the world," as reported by Express UK, but Junor revealed that "nothing could be further from the truth."
The author wrote, "She hated the countryside, hated his family’s passion for horses and dogs, hated the rain that poured down remorselessly; and she felt that her husband was avoiding intimate contact."
She continued, "They didn’t stay in the main house, but they had dinner with the rest of the Royal Family several times a week and, as usual, his friends were invited – though not the Parker Bowles' – so there was very little chance for the sort of intimacy she’d hoped for on honeymoon. She was raging and getting no meaningful reassurance from Charles."
The lack of "meaningful reassurance from Charles" made Diana even madder but the Prince seemed to have “left dealing with Diana to others” as he went to the countryside to find his peace.
He asked his secretary Michael Colborne to keep Diana company while he roamed on the estate but that was the "most shocking, distressing and draining days of Michael’s life," wrote Junor. "For six solid hours, with no distraction beyond a plate of sandwiches at lunchtime, he sat there while Diana cried, paced around the room, kicked the furniture, ranted about everyone and everything to do with the place she hated so much, and then fell into brooding silence before starting all over again," she continued.
"Mystified and despondent," Prince Charles had no idea what was going on. Junor penned, "He didn’t know what had gone wrong or how he was going to cope."
Even after the birth of their sons, their relationship didn't change and the two endured the unhappy union for 15 years until their divorce in 1996.
The "blazing rows" and forceful affection finally saw its end.
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