How Did Meghan Markle Meet Prince Harry?

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are married with a child now, but it wasn’t all that long ago that the two were just meeting for the first time. It turns out that royals and Hollywood stars meet the same way anyone else does—on a blind date.

A mutual friend introduced the two, who declined to reveal her identity. Many speculate that fashion designer Misha Nonoo was the matchmaker while others thought stylist Jessica Mulroney was playing cupid. Publicist Violet von Westenholz, whose father is friends with Prince Charles, has also been rumored to be the smart lady.

In any case, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s first blind date in July 2016 quickly turned into a second. “So we went and met for a drink then, I think, very quickly into that we said, ‘What are we doing tomorrow? We should meet again,’” Meghan recalled in her engagement interview with BBC.

Neither knew much about the other before going into the date. However, they both came out wanting to schedule more time together.

“And then it was like — diaries,” Prince Harry recalled. “We need to get the diaries out and find out how we are going to make this work because I was off to Africa for a month. She was working. We said, ‘Right, where is the gap?’ And the gap happened to be in the perfect place.”

In that gap, Meghan visited Harry in Botswana. “We camped out with each other under the stars, we spent — she came and joined me for five days out there, which was absolutely fantastic,” he recalled. “So then we were really by ourselves, which was crucial to me to make sure that we had a chance to get to know each other.”

They’d be engaged less than a year and a half later, announcing their plans to marry in November 2017. The couple worked fast to plan their wedding and walked down the aisle on May 19, 2018. Less than a year later, they welcomed baby Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor on May 6.