The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary this May, but Prince Harry revealed a “surreal” detail about the day they first started messaging one another.
Writing in his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry said he first laid eyes on American actress Meghan Markle when he saw a photo of her with his friend, Violet Von Westenholz, on Instagram, back in 2016.
The pair began messaging one another on the social media app before swapping numbers and texting late into the night – and the date of their first exchanges is very significant to Harry.
“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,” the Prince wrote.
Diana, Princess of Wales was tragically killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997, when Harry was just 12.
The Duke speaks about the impact of his late mother’s death and the effect grief has had on him throughout his book, which was released earlier this month.
In Harry and Meghan’s six-part Netflix docuseries, the Duke spoke about another happy twist of fate.
The couple announced they were expecting their second child, Lilibet, on Valentine’s Day in 2021. In the final episode, Harry said that after the announcement he received messages showing clippings from a front page of a newspaper where Diana had revealed she was pregnant with her second child (Harry) on 14 February 1984.
“I was shocked. We had no idea. It was just a coincidence, or maybe not a coincidence,” Harry said.
