Prince William and Kate Middleton’s love story began at St Andrews University in Scotland — though it almost never happened. Just one semester in, William reportedly considered leaving school altogether, feeling homesick and out of place.
“My father was very understanding about it… and in the end we both realized — I definitely realized — that I had to come back,” William later said.
He stayed, and by his second semester, he’d noticed a “shy” and “quieter” fellow student named Kate. The two became friends first, sharing morning runs and breakfasts together, before things shifted at a charity fashion show in 2002 — where William watched Kate walk the runway in a now-famous see-through dress.
“It was clear to us that William was smitten with Kate,” a friend who witnessed it said.
Their friendship grew into something more once they moved into a shared off-campus flat — though it almost didn’t happen. The building had a strict no-boys policy, until the landlady learned exactly who was asking.
“I said to this young lady we’d really rather not have more boys and she said, ‘What if I were to tell you that it was Prince William?'” landlady Charlotte Smith recalled, in an interview with the Daily Mail.
Living together as friends, something shifted. “
It just sort of blossomed from there, really,” William later said in their engagement interview, revealing that he even tried cooking for her — disastrously.
“I was trying to cook these amazing fancy dinners, and what would happen was I would burn something, something would catch on fire and she would be sitting in the background trying to help,” he admitted.
“There’s a true romantic in there,” Kate added.
The couple weathered a painful breakup in 2007, but found their way back to each other. On October 20, 2010, William proposed during a trip to Kenya — with a ring he’d carried in his bag for three weeks, waiting for the right moment.
What started with a shy runner at breakfast became one of the world’s most famous love stories 
