- Even though it may have looked like a real-life fairytale to most of the world, Prince William and Kate Middleton's royal wedding was a scary wake-up call for Prince Harry's longtime on-again, off-again girlfriend Chelsy Davy.
- Even though she and Harry weren't together at the time, Chelsy was invited to the 2011 wedding because she had long been a close friend of the royal family.
- According to royal biographer and historian Robert Lacey, seeing Kate on the big day proved to Chelsy that she didn't want to live the life of a royal and prompted her to break up with Harry for good.
Prince William and Kate Middleton's 2011 wedding looked like a real-life fairytale...at least to some people, that is. To others, it looked like a giant ball of stress that needed to be avoided in their own lives at all costs. It seemed that way to one person, anyway: Prince Harry's longtime on-again, off-again girlfriend, Chelsy Davy.
Harry and Chelsy weren't officially together when Will and Kate tied the knot, but she was still invited to the festivities, as someone close to the royal family. Apparently, seeing Kate on that fateful day was the final nail in the proverbial relationship coffin as far as Chelsy was concerned and it prompted her to have a difficult conversation with Harry after.
In Battle of Brothers, royal expert Robert Lacey writes that shortly after the wedding, Chelsy sat Harry down to have the Big Talk about ending their romance for good.
"In 2011, after more comings and goings, she finally decided to go—and it was, ironically, Kate and William's grand and glorious wedding that spring that did it for her," he wrote, according to The Mirror. "According to a friend, she told Harry that she could never make the sacrifices she had witnessed Kate making, particularly when it came to molding her life around the unremitting attention of the press."
According to the Mirror's report, Chelsy would later describe the royal wedding as "so full on—crazy and scary and uncomfortable."
Another royal biographer, Angela Levin, also covered Chelsy's reaction to Will and Kate's royal wedding in her book, Harry: Conversations with the Prince.
"A friend revealed that seeing the enormity and pomp of the day convinced Chelsy that she and Harry had been right to separate," she wrote, per The Mirror. "Although they had a lot in common, she saw clearly that because they came from such different worlds it could never have worked, especially as she valued her privacy and guarded it so carefully."
Obviously, everything worked out the way it was supposed to, since Harry later found his soulmate, Meghan Markle, and Chelsy has definitely moved on, too.
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