Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s relationship seems like the stuff of literal fairytales. A handsome prince and a beautiful actress flee their restrictive palace life for a quiet civilian one—look, even the short version sounds like something Hugh Grant would have starred in 1996.
But according to Andrew Morton, Princess Diana’s royal biographer who was recently interviewed on Podcast Royal, Prince Harry was not in a dark place for several years before meeting Meghan. “He was stumbling out of bars disheveled and worse the wear for drink, and he didn't seem to have a compass,” Morton told the show’s co-hosts, per the Daily Mail. “He was struggling to find himself and struggling with the loss of his mother—struggling to come to terms with it and, as a young man, he wasn't always [the] Harry of popular imagination.”
Morton described Harry in his younger days as a “very angry young man” who “didn’t know where to turn.” This was also, the Daily Mail points out, when Harry was in the headlines for a series of bad choices: Wearing a Nazi armband at a costume party, getting into a scuffle with a photographer outside of a nightclub, and being photographed naked after a game of strip pool during a Las Vegas trip.
Morton says that at this time, Harry was “taking on the world” because he didn’t have an outlet or a way to cope with his anger. Until, that is, he started the Invictus Games, which Morton describes as Harry’s “call in life,” and shortly thereafter, met Meghan Markle. “'I think even when she fell for Harry, she insisted that he went for counselling for the anger issues that he had,” Morton told the podcast hosts.
Morton really casts their relationship in a different light, and the challenges Harry faced as a young man make the healthiness of his marriage now seem both more relatable and a lot more meaningful.