I dated someone obsessed with Princess Diana – he wanted me to look like her

He was utterly obsessed with the late Diana, Princess of Wales (Picture: Getty/ Metro)

‘I just wish women were more demure, like Princess Diana,’ my boyfriend, Jim*, sighed to his group of friends – while giving me unflinching eye contact.

It was difficult not to take that personally. As if the blatant sexism wasn’t enough, Jim was making a very obvious and targeted suggestion.

I stared back at him nervously, then looked at his friends. Their eyes were also on me – only they were confused and sympathetic. It was my first time meeting them, and it was not going well.

They shrugged and moved the conversation away from Diana, where it strangely always seemed to end up.

Because, while Jim had been dating me for about a month at that point, he was utterly obsessed with the late Diana, Princess of Wales – and it didn’t take long for me to decide I’d had enough.

A month before, while swiping on Hinge, I came across Jim’s profile. He was a good-looking guy with a fun dress sense. So much so, that it was the photo with him wearing a Princess Diana t-shirt that I replied to with: ‘Love Princess Di!’

What I didn’t realise was that his love for her was very different from mine. While I found her iconic and misunderstood, he very much wished he had dated her.

I realised how much this man was fixated with our late Princess (Picture: by Anwar Hussein/Getty Images)

He replied almost immediately, and we got chatting. It was mostly about fashion – he told me about the retro website he’d got the t-shirt from, and then we moved on to topics such as TV shows (he was watching The Crown).

I’m not sure if it was his winning smile or what, but none of that seemed foreboding at the time.

It was only as the relationship started that I realised how much this man was fixated with our late Princess. Funnily enough, he didn’t like the rest of the Royal Family; in fact, he believed in multiple conspiracy theories about them that all felt incredibly unhinged.

But he seemed friendly enough and interested in me, so I put all this down to ‘little quirks’.

We got on well, and made our relationship official (Picture: Getty Images)

After our first date at a restaurant, where I turned up in cycling shorts and a sweater as an ode to sporty Di, I could almost immediately see love in his eyes. He was absolutely smitten by me. 

We got on well, and after a few more dates, we made our relationship official.

The thing is, he hid his obsession quite well. He didn’t speak about Diana constantly, but eventually I realised he was almost always biding his time in a conversation until he was able to creep her name into the chat.

On our second date, he seemed upset that I didn’t wear cycling shorts and a sweater. I laughed it off.

On the third date, he wanted to go to Kensington Palace, which was beautiful, but he just stared at the statue of Diana the whole time.

I had just had to kick my Princess-Diana-obsessed boyfriend out of my house (Picture:Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

The fifth date was at his apartment – and opening his wardrobe to be presented with an overwhelming amount of t-shirts with Princess Diana’s face plastered on it felt like the part of a horror film where you know the pretty girl is about to die.

We made the plan to hang out with his friends at the pub around one month in. At this point in our relationship, I wanted out – especially because, by this point, he had begun to sow the seeds of my absolute and utter disdain of him and his apparent habit of negging (a technique where someone uses a backhanded compliment to lower another person’s confidence).

I tipped over the edge when we came back to mine after our meet-up with his friends – already seething about his bizarrely sexist ‘demure’ comment – when, as I walked into my living room in my PJs, he frowned.

‘If you cut your hair like Princess Diana, you’d look so much prettier’, he said, as I stood in front of him pulling my long locks into a ponytail.

I paused, clenched my fists and finally screamed in frustration.

‘Jim! Shut up about Princess goddamn Diana, for Christ’s sake!’

He looked back at me, shocked; claimed he ‘rarely spoke about her’; and then quickly got up and slammed the front door on his way out.

I burst out laughing at how ridiculous my life had become. I had just had to kick my Princess-Diana-obsessed boyfriend out of my house.

Luckily he instantly blocked my number and I never heard from him again.

I was grateful to have made it out of the relationship before he turned me into his version of the late Princess (Picture: David Levenson/Getty Images)

But I messaged all my friends who were either relieved it was over, or sad that they wouldn’t get any more ‘creepy Diana stories’.

Either way, I was grateful to have made it out of the relationship before he turned me into his version of the late Princess.

Since then, whenever I went on dates where someone brought up a celebrity, I immediately assumed they had that person’s face plastered all over their bedroom walls.

Thankfully, it’s never happened again and I am now able to hear Princess Diana’s name without sweating.

Eventually, I understood that he simply didn’t want me for who I was, and I needed to find someone who did.

Luckily, my next relationship didn’t try to change me into someone I wasn’t – and simply adored me for me.

*Name has been changed

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