When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle first started dating, many royal fans thought they made an unlikely match — he’s British royalty and she’s an American actress, for starters — but we’ve now learned that the two actually bonded over one big thing they have in common. According to a new report, Harry, 33, and Meghan, 36, were brought together because of their parents’ similar heartbreak during their respective childhoods.

In the past, both Harry and Meghan have spoken out about the demise of their parents’ marriages. Meghan’s mom, Doria Ragland, and dad, Thomas Markle, split when she was just six years old in the mid-1980s. “My dad would come on Sundays to drop me off, and we’d watch Jeopardy! eating dinner on TV trays, the three of us… We were still so close-knit,” Meg once said of Doria and Thomas’ co-parenting relationship. However, one of Meghan’s childhood friends, Ninaki Priddy, has revealed her parents’ divorce was “hard for her.”

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Priddy continued, “Sometimes she felt she had to pick sides. She was always trying to make sure each of them was happy. She’d have to relay messages. It was literally stuff like, ‘Tell your mother,’ or ‘Tell your father.'” Harry’s parents, Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, similarly separated in 1992 when the young royal was eight years old. Though Charles and Diana publicly referred to their breakup as “amicable,” Harry once recalled that it was difficult to see the demise of his parents’ marriage.

“There was a point in which our parents split, and [Prince William and I] were bouncing between the two of them and we probably never saw our mother enough, or saw our father enough. You know, there was a lot, a lot of traveling, and a lot of fights on the back seat with my brother… of which I’d win. So, there was all of that to contend with, and I don’t pretend that we’re the only people to have to deal with that. But it was an interesting way of growing up,” he said.

Diana’s former royal butler, Paul Burrell, has also spoken out about the boys’ reaction to the separation. “It was upsetting for them to watch the fall-out of their parents’ marriage and whenever Diana got upset, they would push notes under her door saying, ‘It will be OK.’ Diana smothered them in love, and they always slept in her room during that time and not the nursery,” he once revealed. We’re so glad Harry and Meghan bonded over their upbringings and found each other!

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