These days, any talk about Prince Charles and Princess Diana's relationship is pretty dark. Over the years, the faults in their seemingly perfect love story have been revealed from nearly every angle.
There's also a lot of royal-centric media that plays up the drama. It makes it hard to remember that there were also good times between Prince Charles and Princess Diana. As salacious the details of their various scandals were, the two also shared a love and understanding of each other that was uniquely their own.
In fact, Diana and Charles were back on good footing during the summer she died. Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles, detailed the state of things in an interview with The Telegraph.
"At the end of Diana's life, she and Charles were on the best terms they’d been for a very long time," Tina said.
"Charles got into the habit of dropping in on her at Kensington Palace and they would have tea and a sort of rueful exchange. They even had some laughs together. It was definitely calming down, the boys were older. They talked about their philanthropies. And she had accepted Camilla. One thing she had finally done was really understand that Camilla was the love of his life, and there was just nothing she could do about it.
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"But she said to me at that lunch that she would go back to Charles in a heartbeat if he wanted her. Diana was desperately lonely. She still wished that her marriage could have survived. She didn't say, "I'm so happy to be divorced.' She said, 'I think we would have made a great team.'"
There's no knowing what kind of friendship or return to romance could have occurred between the two. But there are the good times, however rare, to look back on.
The process around the royal wedding was complete chaos, but at the time, Diana was truly enamored with her prince.
"I remember being so in love with my husband that I couldn't take my eyes off him," she said, according to Andrew Morton's Diana: In Her Own Words.
"I just absolutely thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. He was going to look after me."
In 1983, Charles and Diana took Prince William, then 10 months old, on their royal tour of Australia. It was a happy time for the family. After a rough start to their marriage with the whole Camilla cufflink situation, the two had finally found themselves in a good place and in love with their little boy. You can see their happiness in this footage of them dancing from the tour.
Diana struggled through some tough pregnancies, but she did find that Charles was attentive during those times. She recalled a particularly sunny period before they welcomed Harry.
"Charles and I were very, very close to each other the six weeks before Harry born, the closest we had ever been and ever will have been," she told Andrew Morton.
We've seen many a royal wife look on adoringly as their man plays polo, and Di was no exception. While it may have annoyed her behind the scenes, she seems to have enjoyed Charles and his little uniform on a number of occasions.
In 1985, Charles and Diana engaged in some serious PDA. They were kissing in public constantly, even though behind the scenes things were starting to take a turn for the worse. It may have felt performative, but there were definitely still some strong feelings between the two during that time.
In 1987, Prince Charles and Princess Diana visited Australia on a two-week-long royal tour. The couple visited the Alcoa Aluminum Smelter Project, where they were required to wear hard hats to tour the facility.
One look at Charles in a hard hat and Diana lost it. Charles looked a little sheepish, but he took it in good stride as he joked with employees.
"Do your wives always laugh at you when you've got your hat on?" he asked them, with a laugh.
Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson's wedding was also another reportedly happy time for the couple. Diana had been friends with Sarah Ferguson and was a matchmaker of sorts in getting the two together. Sarah was a hit with the royals, earning Diana some brownie points and keeping her in Charles' good graces.
