What did Diana feel upon marrying into the Royal Family?

Journalist: Your Royal Highness, how prepared were you for the pressures that came with marrying into the Royal Family?
Diana: At the age of 19, you always think you’re prepared for everything, and you think you have the knowledge of what’s coming ahead. But although I was daunted at the prospect at the time, I felt I had the support of my husband-to-be.
Journalist: What were the expectations that you had for married life?
Diana: I think like any marriage, especially when you’ve had divorced parents like myself, you’d want to try even harder to make it work and you don’t want to fall back into a pattern that you’ve seen happen in your own family. I desperately wanted it to work. I desperately loved my husband and I wanted to share everything together, and I thought that we were a very good team.
Journalist: How aware were you of the significance of what had happened to you? After all, you’d become Princess of Wales, ultimately with a view to becoming Queen.
Diana: I wasn’t daunted, and am not daunted by the responsibilities that that role creates. It was a challenge. It is a challenge. As for becoming Queen, it’s, it was never at the forefront of my mind when I married my husband: it was a long way off that thought. The most daunting aspect was the media attention, because my husband and I, we were told when we got engaged that the media would go quietly, and it didn’t, and then when we were married they said it would go quietly and it didn’t, and then it started to focus very much on me, and I seemed to be on the front of a newspaper every single day, which is an isolating experience, and the higher the media put you, place you, the bigger is the drop. And I was very aware of that.
Journalist: How did you handle the transition from being Lady Diana Spencer to the most photographed, the most talked-about woman in the world?
Diana: Well, it took a long time to understand why people were so interested in me, but I assumed it was because my husband had done a lot of wonderful work leading up to our marriage and our relationship. But then I, during the years you see yourself as a good product that sits on a shelf and sells well and people make a lot of money out of you.
Journalist: It’s been suggested in some newspapers that you were left largely to cope with your new status on your own. Do you feel that was your experience?
Diana: Yes, I do, on reflection. But then here was a situation which hadn’t ever happened before in history, in the sense that the media were everywhere, and here was a fairy story that everybody wanted to work. And so it was, it was isolating, but it was also a situation where you couldn’t indulge in feeling sorry for yourself: you had to either sink or swim. And you had to learn that very fast.
Journalist: And what did you do?
Diana: I swam. We went to Alice Springs, to Australia, and we went and did a walkabout, and I said to my husband: ’ what do I do now?’ And he said, ’ Go over to the other side and speak to them.’ I said, ’ I can’t, I just can’t.’ He said, ’ Well, you’ve got to do it.’ And he went off and did his bit, and I went off and did my bit. It practically finished me off there and then, and I suddenly realized—I went back to our hotel room and realized the impact that, you know, I had to sort myself out. We had a six-week tour—four weeks in Australia and two weeks in New Zealand—and by the end, when we flew back from New Zealand, I was a different person. I realized the sense of duty, the level of intensity of interest, and the demanding role I now found myself in.