Charles and Diana

[Mermaid1962]

I'd be very happy to talk about the 'good times", Dman.

Also, let's not always talk about the bad and sad years. It's very factual that Charles and Diana did love each other. They both agreed on the way to bring up their children and they had some good times as a couple. These things aren't widely talked about nor written.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

The vast majority of her fans do not accept that she was in any way to blame for the breakdown of her marriage and accuse anyone who says so of all sorts of names. To most of her fans she is a saint who could do no wrong.

I have rarely encountered any fan of Diana who says she in any way contributed to the breakdown of the marriage and most of them want Charles to die before the Queen.

Diana's fans are some of the most hateful people I encounter on the internet and in person.

You are an exception.

I liked Diana and admired her tremendously when she first came on the scene, then with reservations as I matured and was able to balance fantasy and first impressions with the reality of what I was seeing and reading. I do accept that she was at least partly and maybe more-to blame for the disintegration of her marriage.

But I continue to believe that she was essentially a decent if troubled person who accomplished a lot of good in this world with what she had to work with.

Charles also behaved in ways that I found frankly deplorable at times, but I admire him very much for the way he has raised his sons and I think he will make a wonderful king.

Your opinion of Diana fans as "hateful" is the way I would describe many of the late princess's detractors on this Forum and others. It seems not enough for some of them that she is dead..quite dead...and will never be queen.

They seem to want to dig up her remains, put them on show trial, and burn them in effigy.

Irrational and unbelievable imo.

 

[Dman]

I think they loved each other a bit.. She loved him, but in a childlike fairytale way.. and he loved her, but I think he never loved her deeply and that he soon fell out of love because he found her so hard to live with. I don't believe that they agreed all that much about the children..He wanted them to have a loving Mum, and to be more "cared for" at home and part of their home life than he had had..but he was conscious of their positon and felt perhaps that Di let them be too informal...

They did agree on how the children should be raised. After her passing, Charles continued the job of raising them in the manner in which they both agreed. Charles was a bit old school and raised in a stiff and starchy environment, so we wouldn't have seen him taking the kids to amusement parks and McDonalds and stuff like that. It was out of his league, but he approved of Diana doing so though.

They wanted the kids to be raised differently then how they were raised. Sadly, they couldn't provide a stable marital home for them, but in other cases they were together on.

I know some people may disagree with me, but I think they did a pretty good job. They have flaws and have been through a lot, like most of us, but they're good guys and with good heads on their shoulders. If they were spoiled, snobby, very disrespectful and long term playboy Princes. I would say Charles and Diana sucked very big eggs as parents. This is not the case though.

 

[Osipi]

I think you nailed it, Dman, in your synopsis of Charles and Diana.

Its very easy to confuse the "being in love" at the onset of a relationship which generally should be called "being in lust" as there's the grand physical attraction, and one puts their best foot forward to impress the other person and this often continues into the marriage. Deeply loving one's spouse doesn't happen over night and takes work and compromise and genuine caring about the other person. As time passed, it became harder and harder for both Diana and Charles to nurture their feelings of loving each other and then the marriage itself went totally downhill. It happens in the best of relationships sometimes.

I don't think Charles and Diana ever stopped caring about each other. They just couldn't make it work in a marriage.

 

[Denville]

I think it was closer to being in lust on Charles' side. I think he found Di very attractive and hoped that he had enough I common with her to work out a marriage. She loved him but it was loving the image in her own mind of him.. not the real man, and when in marriage she had to deal with the real man, she found him boring, stuffy, diffcuclt and too often, in her mind, thinking about another woman.
I dotn think that she ever quite lost a certain feeling for him.. though because he was so important to her..and I think that had he been willing to "give it another try" in the 90s she would have agreed...but their incompatibility would probably have surfaced again. and I don't beleive he would have ever tried.. HE fell out of love soon, got very fed up with her, put off by her tantrums and weeping fits and the vomiting which he coudlnt' really understand. I think in later years he did still feel a bit of pity and affection for her, but it was a long way from love..

 

[Dman]

I think you nailed it, Dman, in your synopsis of Charles and Diana.

Its very easy to confuse the "being in love" at the onset of a relationship which generally should be called "being in lust" as there's the grand physical attraction, and one puts their best foot forward to impress the other person and this often continues into the marriage. Deeply loving one's spouse doesn't happen over night and takes work and compromise and genuine caring about the other person. As time passed, it became harder and harder for both Diana and Charles to nurture their feelings of loving each other and then the marriage itself went totally downhill. It happens in the best of relationships sometimes.

I don't think Charles and Diana ever stopped caring about each other. They just couldn't make it work in a marriage.

I agree. Although they couldn't make their marriage work, they never stopped caring for each other.

One of Diana closet friend just died the other day. She publicly stated that the love of Diana's life was Charles. Sadly, I think Diana accepted that a marriage between them wasn't possible and (I also think) she couldn't have him anyway.

I wish she had the chance to find another love. Perhaps she found it in her next life beyond this earthly realm.

 

[Denville]

She did find other loves. They didn't work out. But no, I don't believe that Charles went on caring for her, except in terms of being upset at her death, and perhaps wishing that they had been able to be happier together. In Tina Brown's book he's quoted as saying that he didn't read the newspapers, because they were full of "what my bloody crazy wife's been doing.."

 

[Dman]

She did find other loves. They didn't work out. But no, I don't believe that Charles went on caring for her, except in terms of being upset at her death, and perhaps wishing that they had been able to be happier together. In Tina Brown's book he's quoted as saying that he didn't read the newspapers, because they were full of "what my bloody crazy wife's been doing.."

They had some tough days, but the man did wear his wedding ring from Diana up until he became engaged to Camilla. He only let her go when he officially moved on.

 

[loonytick]

She could be incredibly charming, and by the time they met he'd mastered the art of making a good first impression. I'm quite sure the skills that made them good at public appearances helped create a situation in which both of them initially saw promise for a connection with the other.

The tricky thing is that they both, especially at that time, seem to have been the sort to "live in their heads," so to speak. What I mean by that is that they seem to have kept quite a bit of their thoughts to themselves as they tried to present the "correct" front to others, even within their own family. To hide their vulnerabilities, as it were. It's a trait that Charles certainly would have learned while trying to please his father as a child (a common side effect with father and son have very different personalities; I'm not one who calls Philip mean or cold, rather just a difficult match for Charles' more senstitive nature). It's a mindset that, when it goes to toxic levels, can manifest in something harmful like Diana's bulemia.

But if neither was able to be frank and honest about their needs, and if the connection never developed beyond that initial charming each other phase, then of course it was a recipe for both parties getting frustrated by the other not recognizing, much less providing, what they most craved.

In some ways Charles was lucky because there is a long tradition of royal men finding an outlet in mistresses. There was an established pattern to follow and a certain degree of acceptance that he knew he could find by taking that route with Camilla. Even if it was no longer ok to be out in the open about affairs, he could take comfort in the knowledge that his caste would react with a certain attitude of, "ok, this is not ideal, but it happens sometimes."

Diana, on the other hand, had no accepted outlet for her frustrations. While he could step away from their dysfunction and find his even keel through another relationship, she was expected to just suck it up and bury her feelings. That she was on less even footing to start with surely exacerbated the marital problems on her end. I mean, she came into the marriage not only young but naive for her age, in the midst of an eating disorder, with a fairytale "happily ever after" image of marriage that was unfortunately not able to be tempered by a real life example of a healthy one (thanks to her parents' messy love lives) and then found herself in a not-functioning relationship with no healthy outlet for expressing her discomfort. Of course she became a powder keg.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

Wonderful and insightful comments, I agree!

Princess Grace was asked her opinion about then Lady Diana when she met the Royal fiancee shortly before the wedding. Grace's face clouded over and she reportedly responded "she's young...way too young for him. I think it will not end well" or something like that.

Grace had no idea how right she was.

 

[Pranter]

Her age might not of mattered so much if they had more in common.



LaRae

 

[loonytick]

Her age might not of mattered so much if they had more in common.

Absolutely. It wasn't any one thing, it wasn't just him being cold or just her being immature, it was an all-around doomed-for-failure situation thanks to a collection of unworkable differences between the two of them that created an inability for those two to communicate and grow with each other in a productive manner.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

But I don't believe Grace was referring just to Diana's chronological age. In the passage I remember reading the late Princess of Monaco seemed to imply that Diana was also "young for her age" of 19...a polite way of saying she found her emotionally quite immature.

Which I agree that she was in retrospect. And since Charles was an "elderly" 30 year old, this really handicapped the relationship.

 

[Osipi]

I think one of the most poignant sentences I've ever read that puts Charles and Diana into a compact nutshell is "They both wanted to be understood but neither of them could understand".

 

[Anfisa]

Maybe it was a different time, but the idea of a 32 year old man marrying a 19 year old girl is kind of nauseating. It makes Charles come off as a bit of a creep to be honest.

I'm 19, and I'd have more in common with a baby than a man in his 30s.

 

[Pranter]

Meh...I know a number of folks in real life who have large age differences where it works fine.

The thing I have always faulted Charles for was he let himself be pushed/persuaded and didn't stand up and say no to his father and public pressure. He *needed* to get married and she filled the bill well enough at the time.

LaRae

 

[Osipi]

Maybe its because I'm older or something but I've seen and met many people in their 30s that are less mature and grounded than some 19 year olds I've met. I think it really depends on the person.

Meh...I know a number of folks in real life who have large age differences where it works fine.

The thing I have always faulted Charles for was he let himself be pushed/persuaded and didn't stand up and say no to his father and public pressure. He *needed* to get married and she filled the bill well enough at the time.

LaRae

Sometimes it takes getting into a real sticky situation before one can grow a backbone and stand up for oneself. We saw this later on in Charles' life when he finally did stand up and say "non-negotiable".

Charles really was between a rock and a hard place when trying to decide whether or not to marry Diana. He had pressure on him from all kinds of angles. I'd bet my last cough drop that if there wasn't pressure, he wouldn't have married Diana.

 

[Pranter]

No I don't think he would of either...and if they could of 'dated' (such as it was then) longer that would of ended things. We already know Diana was ready to back out ...wonder if Charles was as well.

LaRae

 

[Dman]

I've always said Charles and Diana needed martial counseling and it was never received. Too much pressure to put on a show on the royal stage, but no help fixing or resolving the issues in the home.

 

[Osipi]

What a lot of people don't know or don't remember is that one of Diana's patronages she took on in 1990 was Relate which, at the time, was Britain's leading marriage counseling agency. From the People article at the time:

"Last year the Princess became patron of Relate, Britain’s leading marriage counseling agency, after attending a training session in which counselors acted out the roles of a couple arguing. “She was riveted,” recalls David French, Relate’s director. In February Diana gave a moving address to a crowd of about 200 at Relate’s Family of the Year ceremony. “Marriage offers stability, and maybe that is why nearly 7,000 couples a week begin new family lives of their own,” said Diana. “Sadly, for many, reality fails to live up to expectations. When that happens, most couples draw on new reserves of love and strength.”

Princess with a Purpose

Its too bad that Diana's own private life didn't benefit from this.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

Meh...I know a number of folks in real life who have large age differences where it works fine.

The thing I have always faulted Charles for was he let himself be pushed/persuaded and didn't stand up and say no to his father and public pressure. He *needed* to get married and she filled the bill well enough at the time.

LaRae

Same here. He knew what was at stake, for once in his life he should have told the DoE to go pound sand and leave him alone.

And it wasn't just Prince Philip. Fleet Street had fallen madly in love with "Shy Di" and were pushing her like crazy after she was spotted at Balmoral with Charles.

I believe Charles felt he could eventually fall in love with Diana, or at least love her enough to have a satisfying and nurturing marriage.

And I think he did try...somewhat.

 

[Pranter]

Yeah *somewhat*....I'm afraid I've never gotten past the 'whatever love is' during the engagement interview. She was not mature enough to realize that was a huge red flag.

Can you imagine? Your fiancee saying to anyone, let alone the world, 'whatever love is' after being asked if you are in love???

I'd of been giving that ring back before the end of the day.

Maybe if they had been more compatible then it wouldn't of mattered so much...but she wanted to be valued and loved and I don't think he ever really loved her. Not past a superficial level.


LaRae

 

[Osipi]

Yeah *somewhat*....I'm afraid I've never gotten past the 'whatever love is' during the engagement interview. She was not mature enough to realize that was a huge red flag.

Can you imagine? Your fiancee saying to anyone, let alone the world, 'whatever love is' after being asked if you are in love???

I'd of been giving that ring back before the end of the day.

Maybe if they had been more compatible then it wouldn't of mattered so much...but she wanted to be valued and loved and I don't think he ever really loved her. Not past a superficial level.


LaRae

I would be keeping the ring and giving out a few choice words not suitable for posting here.

 

[Pranter]

I would be keeping the ring and giving out a few choice words not suitable for posting here.

HA not me..I'd of flung at his face, had my say (probably some not nice words as well) and been done with him.



LaRae

 

[Dman]

Yeah *somewhat*....I'm afraid I've never gotten past the 'whatever love is' during the engagement interview. She was not mature enough to realize that was a huge red flag.

Can you imagine? Your fiancee saying to anyone, let alone the world, 'whatever love is' after being asked if you are in love???

I'd of been giving that ring back before the end of the day.

Maybe if they had been more compatible then it wouldn't of mattered so much...but she wanted to be valued and loved and I don't think he ever really loved her. Not past a superficial level.


LaRae

She was perplexed by his response. She giggled it off during the interview, but was thrown off by it all. You'd think her mother, sisters or someone older in her life would've pointed out to her to talk to her husband-to-be and set some things straight. No one was really thinking and were way too caught up in the enormity of her being engaged to the Prince of Wales and future King. The stiff upper lips took over. No proper support team.

 

[Pranter]

She was perplexed by his response. She giggled it off during the interview, but was thrown off by it all. You'd think her mother, sisters or someone older in her life would've pointed out to her to talk to her husband-to-be and set some things straight. No one was really thinking and were way too caught up in the enormity of her being engaged to the Prince of Wales and future King. The stiff upper lips took over. No proper support team.

She giggled and tried to go along with it, and fairly nervous.

Yeah I don't know about her family. Her mother, above all, should of really sat her down and talked to her about it all...and who knows maybe she did but Diana was caught up in everything and buried her head in the sand.

When she did raise the issues her sisters told her it was too late to back out. Sarah should of known if anyone did how the ropes were with Charles and things on the inside of the family....and helped her figure out how to get out of it.

I think they must of thought it almost impossible to call it off without backlash.


LaRae

 

[Iluvbertie]

No I don't think he would of either...and if they could of 'dated' (such as it was then) longer that would of ended things. We already know Diana was ready to back out ...wonder if Charles was as well.

LaRae

I have read that during the last week leading up to the marriage Charles wanted to pull out and cancel it because he wasn't sure it would work but both his parents said that that was just 'nerves'.

I know some people who knew Charles around this time who firmly believed then and still believe now that if the press had butted out he would have dropped her by the summer. It was the press coverage that lead Philip to write the letter that really forced Charles' hand. But without the press frenzy they would have come to see that weren't suited to each other.

That is why I am pleased that there hasn't been the pressure on William and Harry to marry their girlfriends just because they have been dating them for so long and in Harry's case he has broken up with two of them despite the press coverage.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

She giggled and tried to go along with it, and fairly nervous.

Yeah I don't know about her family. Her mother, above all, should of really sat her down and talked to her about it all...and who knows maybe she did but Diana was caught up in everything and buried her head in the sand.

When she did raise the issues her sisters told her it was too late to back out. Sarah should of known if anyone did how the ropes were with Charles and things on the inside of the family....and helped her figure out how to get out of it.

I think they must of thought it almost impossible to call it off without backlash.


LaRae

But she did try to talk to her sisters about her doubts over tea at Buckingham Palace. They came back with the now famous reply "Too late to chicken out Duch...your face is on the tea towels".

It was either Sally Bedell-Smith or Tina Brown who also wrote that the night after the grand ball on the eve of the wedding, Diana was spooked that Charles had paid virtually no attention to her and had chatted with Camilla for much of the evening. Diana drove to Althorp and told her father Lord Spencer that she wanted to back out, but he insisted that she return to London and get on with it.

I guess he(and the sisters) felt it was just pre-marital jitters and that she would recover in time for the big day.

I can understand why they felt that way, I suppose.

I also remember like it was yesterday the "whatever love means" interview. I felt so sad when Diana tried to giggle out of it, but you could feel her embarrassment. I wanted to reach through the TV and slap Charles, I really did!

 

[Pranter]

A shame she didn't have more support from her family.

I get being nervous before the wedding etc...I'm not sure how her family thought it was just nerves considering the inside track they would of had. Maybe just old thinking of well it's to be expected that a highly placed royal might have affairs and it's hardly a reason to divorce etc.


LaRae

 

[Moonmaiden23]

The Spencers, in addition to being famously dysfunctional and emotionally stunted ,were and are true blue aristocrats who had existed literally on the perimeters(on the estate at Sandringham) of the British Royal family for centuries.

The invitations had gone out. The crowds were in place. World leaders were converging on London. They loved Diana in their messy way but they knew the drill...backing out after the official announcement of her engagement to the Heir to the Throne had been made was NOT an option at that point.