After her relationship with Prince Charles turned sour, Princess Diana dated a string of lovers, such as Dodi Fayed, who died with her in that 1997 Paris car crash. But what some royal family fans are still unsure of is whether the princess loved these men at all, or if she just used them to make Charles jealous.

One man whom Diana was emotionally attached to at one point was James Hewitt. Ironically, the princess only met Hewitt because she wanted to learn horseback riding, which is a favorite pastime for Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry. She got Hewitt as a riding instructor, but their relationship evolved into a romantic one.

According to Princess Diana herself, she certainly felt something for Hewitt, but they ended their affair after it was exposed to the media. Later on, Hewitt became a paid source in Anna Pasternak’s book “Princess In Love.”

“I adored him. I was in love with him, but I was very let down,” the princess said in BBC1’s 1995 Panorama interview.

But even during her affair with Hewitt, it appears that Diana is still deeply in love with Prince Charles based on the letters she wrote for Hewitt. “All she felt was the force of their jealousy over her popularity, while her fury at Charles’s feelings for Camilla scorched the page,” Pasternak wrote.

Another man that Diana deeply cared about at one point was Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan. The princess reportedly loved Khan deeply to the point that she wanted to marry him.

“Diana was madly in love with Hasnat Khan and wanted to marry him even if that meant living in Pakistan, and that’s one of the reasons why we became friends,” Jemima Khan, a close friend of both Diana and Hasnat, revealed.

Despite how she might have felt for Khan, some of Diana’s close friends say that the princess never stopped loving Charles at all. “I've been loved by white people, black people, gay people, Jewish people. The one man I really loved in my life has not loved me,” Roberto Devorik narrated what Diana once told him.

He added that Diana’s true love remained Charles, despite her numerous affairs. “It's my belief that the man she loved until she closed her eyes was the Prince of Wales,” Devorik said. “After Diana realised that she had lost the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles it was devastating for her. Absolutely devastating.”

Of course Diana taking on lovers doesn’t mean that she did it in an attempt to make her husband jealous. What the princess only wanted was perhaps to find a partner that might make her life complete after it became apparent that her relationship with Charles was already beyond repair.

Prince Charles and Princess Diana
Prince Charles and the Princess of Wales (1961-1997, later Diana, Princess of Wales) at Westminster Abbey, London, for a centenary service for the Royal College of Music. Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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