PRINCE WILLIAM and Kate Middleton started dating while they were studying together at St Andrews, but according to a royal biographer they first met many years before. The Duchess of Cambridge said back in 2010 that when she first met her future husband she “went bright red” and “scuttled off feeling very shy”, although their first meeting may have happened many years before they fell in love as students.
Vanity Fair royal correspondent and author Katie Nicholl claims the pair first set eyes on each other while still young children. As a nine-year-old Prince William was a student at Ludgrove Prep School, and when his school travelled to St Andrew’s Prep for a hockey match he supposedly caught the eye of a young Kate.
In Nicholl’s book Kate: The Future Queen she wrote: “Although she wasn’t especially interested in boys, the arrival of one particular young man had caught her attention.” However it was only when they were students together at the University of St Andrews in Scotland that romance really blossomed. Prince William previously said about their relationship: “We just spent more time with each other, had a good giggle, had lots of fun, and realised we shared the same interests and just had a really good time.
“[Kate’s] got a really naughty sense of humour, which kind of helps me because I’ve got a really dry sense of humour.” Despite amicably splitting in 2007, the pair reconciled after three months and have now been married for over 10 years. They got engaged in 2010 when the prince proposed to Kate with his mother’s striking engagement ring and they tied the knot in April 2011.
They have three children together – Prince George, 8, Princess Charlotte, 6 and Prince Louis, 3. Speaking about the split in 2010, the future King said: “We were both very young. “We were both finding ourselves [….] and being different characters and stuff. “It was very much trying to find our own way, and we were growing up.”
Kate added her own thoughts on their brief time apart. She said: “You find out things about yourself that maybe you hadn’t realised. “You can get quite consumed by a relationship when you’re younger, so I really valued that time.”
