The Zimbabwe-born jewellery designer, who dated the Duke of Sussex on and off between 2004 and 2011, wrote in a blog on Tuesday that she only had the desire to settle down when she met her now-husband Sam Cutmore-Scott.
“Looking back… commitment wasn’t exactly my strong suit,” the 40-year-old wrote, adding: “If I’m completely honest, the only thing I was committed to was having fun.
“I wanted the next trip, the next adventure, the next group of people I hadn’t met yet. I lived in Istanbul. I travelled around South America. I went to Bali, the Amazon, Moscow.”
She went on to confess: “I wasn’t remotely interested in staying in one place, following a conventional career path or committing to anything that might interfere with whatever sounded most exciting.”
However, Chelsy revealed that her outlook on life changed in 2020 when she met hotelier Sam, 42, with whom she now shares three children, Leo, four, Chloe, three, and six-month-old Finn.
“Marriage and motherhood had never been particularly high on my to-do list,” she added.
“Both seemed to represent exactly the things I had spent my adult life avoiding: permanence, responsibility, roots and having to take somebody else’s plans into account.
“It wasn’t that I suddenly developed some great romantic vision of settling down. It was much more instinctive than that. I met Sam and, for the first time, I knew I wanted a family, specifically with him.”
She also noted that she was 35 years old when she met her now-husband, and that “timing and possibly biology” probably played a big part in her decision to set down roots.
The blog was posted on Chelsy’s Aya jewellery website this week ahead of her 41st birthday and saw her reflect on the decade since she started the brand.
Harry and Chelsy met in Cape Town in 2004 while the Duke was enjoying his gap year before starting at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst.
However, their relationship made major headlines over the years, with Chelsy later dubbing the media scrutiny she experienced while dating Harry as “full-on” and “uncomfortable”.
“I found it very difficult when it was bad. I couldn’t cope. I was young, I was trying to be a normal kid and it was horrible,” she said in 2016 in an interview with The Times.
Prince Harry recently blamed the media for the breakdown of his relationship with Chelsy in his phone-hacking and unlawful information-gathering lawsuit against Britain’s Mirror Group Newspapers, which he won.
He claimed in his 2023 testimony that stories produced by the tabloids “led her to make the decision that a royal life was not for her”, which ultimately “was incredibly upsetting” at the time.
It has been fifteen years since Chelsy and Harry called it quits, and both have moved on, married and had children.
The Duke of Sussex met his now-wife Meghan Markle in 2016 after the pair were set up on a blind date in London.
The couple then went on to tie the knot at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle in 2018, before welcoming their first child a year later.
Prince Archie was born in 2019 and their second child, Princess Lilibet, was born in 2021.
The family recently made the move to the United Kingdom after living in the United States for six years and are understood to be basing themselves in the Cotswolds.