The marriage between Princess Diana and Prince Charles was far from perfect. When they first got married, nobody on the outside knew how hard it was for Diana to go through with the wedding. She finally opened up about her eating disorder after the couple’s separation and recalled that she had “a bad fit of bulimia” the night before the wedding. She called it a sign of how much damage was being done. Both Charles and Diana were not sure if it was a good idea when they started dating.
The late princess was more than a dozen years younger than the prince and Diana once said that their age gap left her too immature to fully understand what was going on. At that time, Charles had returned from serving in the Navy and needed a wife. He knew Diana from dating her sister and the family thought Diana would be a great choice for Charles. The duo dated and after 12 dates, Charles proposed to which Diana laughed in shock.
Diana said yes to him but Charles was still in love with Camilla and Diana knew she never had a true connection with the prince. The day before the wedding, Diana tried to call it off but her sisters told her it was too late to “chicken out.” Two days before the wedding, Diana found out that Charles went to see Camilla and gave her a gift. The pressure of knowing that the two were having an affair weighed heavily on Diana and she recalled crying in the days leading up to the wedding.
“I sobbed my eyes out,” Diana said in her recordings to biographer Andrew Morton. “Absolutely collapsed and it was collapsing because of all sorts of things.” Diana said her bulimia returned the night before the wedding. “I had a very bad fit of bulimia,” she said. “I ate everything I could possibly find… I was sick as a parrot that night. It was such an indication of what was going on.”
Prior to walking down the aisle, there were a lot of emotions going through the princess. However, she was at ease on the morning of the wedding. “I was very calm the next morning when we were getting up at Clarence House,” she said.
“Must have been awake about 5 a.m… I was very, very calm. Deathly calm.” Diana referred to herself as a “lamb to the slaughter” when she knew she had to go through with a wedding later that day. “I knew it and couldn’t do anything about it.”
Diana shared about bulimia affecting her at other points in her marriage as well as Charles telling her she looked “a bit chubby.” She once said it took her more than a decade to overcome her eating disorder. /TISG