Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan's docuseries dropped this morning, delivering the first real look at the couple's whirlwind romance, their life together before the royal family got involved, and the moment everything changed.
Episode 1 of Harry & Meghan tells the story of the Sussexes' early romance, including how they first met, how their first few dates went, and how they fell passionately for each other and vowed to do everything in their power to make their relationship work.
One of the first scenes from the episode shows Harry and Meghan being shown throwback footage from an October 2015 interview Meghan—then an actress in the series Suits—did where she was asked whom she would date, Prince William or Prince Harry. "I don't know," she says. "Harry, sure."
"Honey, I'm sorry. I, of course, choose you," Meghan tells Harry, as the prince notes the clip was taken less than a year before the two met.
"It just, again, shows how little you knew" about the royal family, he says. "And look at how far we've come."
As scenes of their life together, now with their two kids, flash on the screen, Harry and Meghan recall their first meeting. Harry says he was scrolling through his Instagram feed (!!!) when he saw a clip a mutual friend had posted with Meghan using the then-popular dog filter on Snapchat.
"I was like, 'Who is that?'" he recalls.
Soon after, he asked the friend to introduce the two through email, and they decided to exchange numbers.
Snippets from their first text messages are displayed, showing how Meghan—after checking Harry's Instagram—agreed to meet him for a quick drink in London, where she was visiting for Wimbledon in July 2016.
"You were late!" Meghan points out, adding that she was initially annoyed that he had kept her waiting for half an hour because he was stuck in traffic, but when he finally arrived all flustered and sweaty, she knew he was actually quite sorry.
"He was just so fun, just so refreshingly fun. And that was the thing. We were like childlike together," Meghan recalls.
Though the date lasted only an hour, they had a great time and agreed to meet the next night for dinner. That time, however, it was Meghan who showed up a bit late.
"I was like, 'You can be as late as you want. I ain't moving. I wanna see you again,'" Harry remembers thinking.
After their second date, Meghan says it was clear they had a strong romantic connection, and they wanted to see where it would go.
The couple's adorable first photo, taken on one of their phones, then fills the screen.
"There was one photo. We just wanted to capture the feeling of just sitting in that little restaurant and going, 'Oh, my gosh, I think we're gonna give it a go,'" Meghan explains.
A month later—August 2016 at this point—and eager to see each other again, they decided to spend a week in Botswana, Africa, together. Harry had to travel there for work, and he invited Meghan to go with him.
Meghan says that though the first moment was pretty "awkward," because neither of them knew what they were getting into, it quickly felt just right between them, and they spent the next five days living in a little tent—no cell service, no outside pressure, just each other's company.
"It just felt so right, and it felt so normal," Harry says.
"We could both just be completely ourselves. … There's no mirror, there's no bathroom. … Thankfully, we really liked each other," Meghan says.
"That was when it just hit me, like, 'Okay, this girl, this woman is amazing, is everything I've been looking for, and she's so comfortable and so relaxed in my company,'" Harry says.
"At the beginning, our relationship was this guarded little treasure," Meghan recalls, smiling at Harry.
Some of Harry and Meghan's friends are interviewed for the docuseries, and all agree that it was evident the two had fallen madly in love very quickly and were willing to adjust their lives to be together.
Meanwhile, Harry remembers being "terrified" he would lose Meghan like he did his other girlfriends—mostly due to the pressures that come with dating a member of the British royal family.
"The pain and suffering of women marrying into this institution … I remember thinking, How can I ever find someone who is willing and capable to be able to withstand all the baggage that comes with being with me?" he says. "Every relationship that I had, within a matter of weeks or months, was splattered all over the newspapers and that person's family harassed and their lives turned upside down. … So when I got to meet M, I was terrified of her being driven away by the media, the same media that had driven so many other people away from me."
Later, Harry recalls his late mother, Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997 after being chased down the street by paparazzi on motorcycles. The prince says his now wife reminds him so much of his mother: their compassion, confidence, warmth.
"I think for so many people in the family, especially obviously the men, there can be a temptation, or an urge, to marry someone who would fit in the mold as opposed to somebody who you perhaps are destined to be with, the difference between making decisions with your head or your heart. And my mom certainly made most of her decisions, if not all of them, from her heart. I am my mother's son," Harry adds.
After their time in Africa, Meghan and Harry say they would see each other at least every two weeks, and because no one knew of their relationship just yet, Meghan could secretly visit him in London and stay with him on the palace grounds.
Finally, one day, Harry's communications manager got word that the press knew about their romance and would go live with a story by morning. So that night, the two recall, they went out to a Halloween costume party with Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank, and enjoyed their last night of freedom.
Then, everything changed.
"They are destroying us," Meghan, by then married to Harry, says in a throwback clip of their life as royals.
"Naively, I didn't know what I was walking into," Harry admits, alluding to the issues that drove him and Meghan to step down as senior royals just four years later.
Now, the two are telling their side of the story, or in Harry's words, "the full truth."
"This is a great love story, and the crazy thing is, I think this love story is only just getting started," Harry adds. "She sacrificed everything that she ever knew, the freedom that she had, to join me in my world. And then, pretty soon after that, I ended up sacrificing everything that I knew to join her in her world."
Rosa Sanchez is the senior news editor at Harper's Bazaar, working on news as it relates to entertainment, fashion, and culture. Previously, she was a news editor at ABC News and, prior to that, a managing editor of celebrity news at American Media. She has also written features for Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, Forbes, and The Hollywood Reporter, among other outlets.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qa3RqZyrq5KWx6Kt0WeaqKVfmLKtscGroK2xX6GutbHSrWaabGJmhXZ9kG9mqaqZo7CmeceaqauxXaKyqLTAp2SmmaKguaZ5w6iarquVp7amv4yep6Krn5mybn2Mq5ycmaBis6q%2B0q1knZmkmnw%3D