One of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s very first meetups was something straight out of a Hollywood rom-com.
The Duke of Sussex told Armchair Expert podcast hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman on Tuesday that an early incognito date between him and Meghan involved pretending not to know each other at a supermarket.
The revelation came when Shepard asked whether the duke ever did normal things growing up, like watch movies or shop for groceries, after Harry compared his life as a royal to a cross between The Truman Show and a zoo.
The duke said that he went to the supermarket with his mum, the late Princess Diana – though only “a handful of times,” due to the constant paparazzi presence – before offering up the anecdote about his early rendezvous with Meghan.
“The first time that Meghan and I met up for her to come and stay with me, we met up in a supermarket in London, pretending that we didn’t know each other, so texting each other from the other side of the aisle,” Harry said, as the hosts giggled.
“There were people looking at me – giving me all these weird looks and coming up and saying hi and whatever – and I was there texting her saying, ‘Is this the right one?’” he said. “She goes, ‘No you want parchment paper,’ and I’m like, OK. [whispering] ‘Where’s the parchment paper?’”
No word on whether the two were working on the same roast chicken recipe they made the night they got engaged.
The two, who are already parents to 2-year-old Archie Harrison, are expecting their second child, a baby girl, very soon. Harry opened up on “Armchair Expert” about the work he’s done to deal with his own trauma to make sure he doesn’t pass it on as a parent.
“If I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering – because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered – I’m going to make sure that I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically,” the royal said.
“There’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on anyway,” he went on. “We as parents should be doing the most we can to try and say, ‘You know what? That happened to me. I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.’”
Harry said it all comes down to “awareness” for him, and asking “How can I change that for my own kids?”
“And, well here I am. I moved my whole family to the US. That wasn’t the plan!” he said as Shepard and Padman laughed again. “But sometimes you’ve got to make decisions and put your family first and put your mental health first.”