He might be a prince with access to palaces and all the finer trimmings in life but when it came to one of Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan’s first dates in London, the couple picked a very low-key location.
Speaking on American actor Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Prince Harry revealed he met up with his now wife in a London supermarket back in 2016 when they first started dating after being set up by a mutual friend.
“The first time Meghan and I met up for her to come and stay with me, we met up in a supermarket in London, pretending we didn’t know each other, so were texting each other from the other side of the aisles,” the 36-year-old revealed on the latest podcast episode.
“There’s people looking at me, giving me all these weird looks, and coming up to me and saying ‘hi’,” Harry remembered of their incognito date.
“I texted her saying “is this the right one”, and she said, “no you want parchment paper”, and “I’m like where’s the parchment paper?!”
“It was nice, I had a baseball cap on, looking down at the floor, trying to stay incognito. It’s amazing how much chewing gum you see, it’s a mess!”
Adventure dates: Prince Harry has revealed he and now wife Meghan Markle met up in a London supermarket back in 2016 and pretended not to know each other.
(Image: Getty)There must have been some kind of magic brewing as we all know the couple went on to tie the knot at St George’s Chapel in Windsor on 19 May 2018.
They welcomed their first child, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, on May 6 2019, and are now expecting their second child – a daughter – together.
During his wide-ranging chat with Shepard, Harry was also asked about what it was really like to be married to a prince.
The soon to be father-of-two said his wife had had the “most amazing explanation for this.”
Expectation vs. reality: Meghan has admitted that being married to a real-life Prince is very different from the public’s perception of what it would be like.
(Image: Getty)“I’m not gonna get this right – but she said ‘You don’t need to be a princess. You can create a life that will be better than any princess’. And that’s coming from her own lived experience,” Harry said.
“We got together and she was like ‘Wow, this is very different to what my friends at the beginning said.'”
The Duke of Sussex, who officially stepped down from royal duties at the start of 2020 and is now living with his family Montecito, Santa Barbara, spoke fondly of his new life in the US.
“Living here now I can actually lift my head and actually I feel different, my shoulders have dropped, so has hers, you can walk around feeling a little bit more free,” Harry pointed out of their new life.
“I can take Archie on the back of my bicycle. I never had the chance to do that.”
Podcast hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman with Prince Harry.
(Image: Instagram)Prince Harry also addressed his decision to leave the Royal Family because he realised in his 20s his life was “a mix between The Truman Show and living in a zoo.”
“It’s the job right? Grin and bear it. Get on with it. I was in my early 20s and I was thinking I don’t want this job, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be doing this,” he said.
“Look what it did to my mum. How am I ever going to settle down and have a wife and family, when I know it’s going to happen again?”
The royal says he turned to therapy to navigate his mental health after Meghan “saw he was angry.”
“Once I started doing therapy it was like the bubble was burst. I plucked my head out of the sand and gave it a good shake off and I was like, ‘You’re in this position of privilege, stop complaining and stop thinking you want something different – make this different – because you can’t get out,” he said.
“‘How are you going to do these things differently, how are you going to make your mum proud and use this platform to really affect change?'”
