Prince Harry admits to abrupt end to date with Meghan Markle and 'curses' himself

  Prince Harry might have fallen head over heels for Meghan Markle from the start - but he has admitted that their initial meeting came to a...

 

Prince Harry might have fallen head over heels for Meghan Markle from the start - but he has admitted that their initial meeting came to a very abrupt end.

In his memoir Spare, Harry explained that he had first become aware of Meghan through a mutual friend's Instagram story. After asking the friend to connect them, he and Meghan began an online conversation that lasted for hours and ended with the pair arranging a date the following evening.

At the time, Meghan was visiting London to attend the Wimbledon Championships and she agreed to meet Harry at Soho House.

On the day, Harry was running late due to traffic - but he was instantly enamoured. "We'd each had first dates on which there was nothing to talk about, and now we both felt that special thrill when there's too much to talk about, when there isn't enough time to say all that needs to be said," he wrote.

But just as quickly as it had begun, the date was over, with Harry explaining he had prior dinner plans. "If I hadn't been late, we'd have had more time. I cursed myself, got to my feet. A brief goodbye hug," he wrote. "Poof, she was gone. Compared to her, Cinderella was the queen of long goodbyes."

After their dates, Harry invited Meghan to visit Botswana, a place very close to his heart. He explained in their engagement interview, "We camped out with each other under the stars. She came and joined me for five days out there, which was absolutely fantastic. So then we were really by ourselves, which was crucial to me to make sure that we had a chance to get to know each other."

Prince Harry later said it was during this trip that he knew Meghan was his "soulmate." The pair opened up further about the trip during their docuseries, sharing that their escape to Botswana came after they had only met twice.

"I was astonished that she said, 'Yes,'" Harry recalled. "This woman, that I've really met twice, she's coming to Botswana, and we're gonna be living in a tent for five days!"

Prince Harry and Meghan's final outing before their relationship became public was when they went to a Halloween party in 2016. "He came to see me in Toronto and our friends and his cousin, Eugenie, and her husband Jack, they came as well, and the four of us snuck out in Halloween costumes to have one fun night on the town before it was out in the world that we were a couple," she told Ellen DeGeneres in a 2021 interview. "It was a post-apocalypse theme, so we had all of this very bizarre costuming on, and we were able to just sort of have one final, fun night out."

Meghan and Harry shared never-before-seen photos of the evening in their Netflix docuseries, noting that they had received a heads up that news of their romance was about to break, so they decided to "pull the pin on the fun grenade" and go all out for their last private outing.