Princess Michael of Kent has spoken about her marriage ahead of her 30th wedding anniversary later this month.
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The princess – nicknamed Princess Pushy – has revealed she and her husband,
Prince Michael, were brought together by the late Lord Mountbatten.
She said: “One day Lord Mountbatten said to Michael, ‘By the way, what are you going to do about that young woman?’ He answered, ‘Why should I do anything?’ ‘She’s madly in love with you’, came the reply.
“Then I too saw Lord Mountbatten and he said: ‘What are you going to do about that young man? He’s madly in love with you.’
“For all we knew, he believed it. I don’t know but from then on we began to look at each other a little differently.”
The couple – who married in 1978 in a civil ceremony in Austria – were friends before they entered into a relationship.
The princess added: “We weren’t heart-thumping ‘Oh my God I haven’t heard from him in two hours’, we were friends before we fell in love.”
Talking about why their marriage has lasted so long, the German-born princess said tolerance, friendship and kindness are the key.
She told Majesty magazine: “Tolerance is terribly important. Looking around at as number of failing marriages I know, there isn’t tolerance, there isn’t friendship and there isn’t kindness.”
The couple have two children, Lord Frederick, 28 and 26-year-old Lady Gabriella.