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From the beginning, Diana’s courtship with Prince Charles, at least as far as Prince Charles was
concerned, was more out of necessity than genuine feelings. By then, Prince Charles was thirty-one,
and a suitable bride for him had to be found relatively quickly, but there were few women still single
that fitted the Royal Family’s criterion of the time. Nonetheless, Diana perfectly fitted all the criteria
for a royal bride, and after several casual encounters with Diana, Prince Charles began to consider
her as a potential bride for him. Prince Charles thought that because of Diana’s open and easy
manner, her warmth, her enthusiasm for rural life, and her background through which she knew a
little of his family she would have few fears marrying into the Royal Family. However, as an insider,
Prince Charles seems to have had little conception of what marrying into the Royal Family actually
meant, and never properly understood the pressures Diana underwent when she entered the royal
circle.
In addition, being in a relationship with Prince Charles meant that the media would, at some point,
inevitably become interested in not just the relationship but the woman who Prince Charles was
seeing. When a story confirming Diana’s status as Prince Charles’s new girlfriend was published,
Diana’s private life was effectively over, and from then on, the press pursued Diana relentlessly until
her death. Nevertheless, Diana read everything that was written about her and began to look for
approval from the press, and because of that the British tabloids were as much players as observers
in Diana’s life. Overall, the media also played a large part in Diana later feeling like a victim even
though she herself needed the publicity and often manipulated the press.
Shortly before Prince Charles proposed to Diana, he was still unsure if he should do it even though
he knew what was expected of him. For Prince Charles, it was difficult to see Diana as a future wife,
let alone the future Queen of England. In addition, he was still in love with Camilla, who had been a
part of Prince Charles’s life since the early 1970s, when Prince Charles had fallen in love with her.
She was the love of his life. However, Camilla was not sufficiently aristocratic nor virginal to be an
acceptable royal bride. However, while Prince Charles was uncertain about Diana, he might have
been even more uncertain about marriage itself and how his bride would cope with all that it
entailed. Prince Charles did not appear to be in love with Diana, but he was fond of her, and he
hoped his feelings could grow into love. Nevertheless, Diana was in love with Prince Charles, and
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she believed that marrying him would provide her with the husband and happy family she had
wanted since childhood. However, Diana failed to comprehend or even give much thought to the
range of duties she would have to take on, and she seemed enchanted mainly by the idea of
becoming a princess. It is clear now that Diana barely knew Prince Charles. The fact that Diana and
Prince Charles did not really know each other well personally before they married later played a
large part in the dissolution of their marriage. In addition, since Prince Charles was the heir to
throne, Diana thought that she would be safe from the possibility of divorce.
Two days after the engagement announcement, Diana moved into Buckingham Palace, symbolically
cutting herself off from normal life for the rest of her life. Diana was frequently alone, and she had
enormous difficulty in dealing with Prince Charles’s inflexible devotion to duty and she disliked his
frequent absences and worried about him whenever he was away. In addition, Prince Charles’s
constant absences deepened Diana’s fears of abandonment and gave her too much time alone to
worry. Her new life was proving to be unexpectedly dreary, lonely, and intimidating. During the
engagement, Diana’s fears over Camilla increased. After the move, Diana went into a dieting binge,
which was to be the onset of a chronic bout of bulimia. Nevertheless, Diana received a lot of help
from the moment she entered Buckingham Palace, and the most experienced courtiers were
assigned to Diana. However, no one knew what to do with the first Princess of Wales since before
the First World War, as no one had thought of a real role for her beyond the fact that she was to be
the wife of the Prince of Wales. It was assumed that, since Diana came from an aristocratic
background and therefore was no stranger to large households, she would cope well with the
transition. In addition, Diana showed little interest in learning what was expected of her and how
the Royal Family and the Household function. Before her move to the palace, Diana had thought
that the Royal Family could become the family that she had not had while growing up, which might
have been the main reason she later felt like a victim of Prince Charles and the Royal Family, because
they rarely showed their feelings, and they did not understand what it was like for someone outside
of the royal circle to marry into the family.
Two days before the wedding day, Diana considered cancelling the wedding. Despite her adoration
for Prince Charles, Diana had doubts over her ability to cope with the consequences of the marriage.
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The sheer momentum with which the events were unfolding meant that Diana had no time to
process them, and the effort of trying to understand it all was crushing Diana. In addition, the
intensity of the media participation was exhausting her. Nevertheless, Diana projected an
impressive serenity during the wedding.
During the honeymoon, Diana’s sporadic depression turned chronic and her bulimia became even
worse than it had been before the wedding. It was during the honeymoon that Diana had to confront
the everyday reality of a married royal, and she began to understand the full impact of life as
Princess of Wales. She was finding it difficult to adapt to life in the Royal Family. In addition, she felt
confined and isolated, incapable of reaching beyond the invisible barrier which now separated her
from the rest of the world. Furthermore, the Royal Family operated by their own rules and
traditions, and Diana’s refusal to follow or even to try to understand them mystified her in-laws,
who were utterly unused to being confronted by such behaviour. The Royal Family had mistakenly
expected that a girl of Diana’s background would be used to the social situations that she was now
facing, but the reality was that Diana had had little exposure and no practice at the formal art of
conversation. Diana’s upbringing had not taught her to behave in a way those situations demanded.
Faced with the relentless need to be dignified and social, Diana’s intellectual inferiority complex
began to show. Royal house parties intimidated Diana in much the same way as gatherings of people
outside her own circle had unnerved her when she was growing up. When Diana began behaving
erratically, members of the Royal Family chose to ignore it in the hope that the problem would
disappear on its own in time. However, their failure to acknowledge Diana’s pain, much less
sympathize with and comfort her, made Diana feel more isolated and wounded than ever. Diana
felt that the Royal family had cast her adrift emotionally, as she had been during her childhood by
her parents’ divorce. As a result, Diana’s relations with the royal-in-laws were not easy. It did not
help that Diana considered herself an outsider, and made little effort to ingratiate herself with the
Royal Family.
It was becoming obvious that Diana and Prince Charles were basically incompatible, even though
both wanted the marriage to succeed. However, despite all this, Prince Charles did not modify his
routines at all for Diana, and because Diana wanted Prince Charles’s undivided attention, she
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