How did Grace Kelly define love and relationships?

Love is — and I say this having lived several different lives in it — the place where one's best self ought to live, and not always does.

I was, in my Hollywood years, perhaps less guarded than the public was permitted to know. I cared deeply for several men, some of whom were married and to whom I should not have given as much of my heart as I did — Bing, who was lonely after Dixie; Ray Milland, which was a true sorrow and a true mistake; Oleg, who designed my clothes and made me laugh; William Holden during Bridges at Toko-Ri, which was honest if brief; the Shah, briefly, by correspondence, which was an education. I was not a saint. I have never claimed to be.

What I learned, and what I would say to a younger woman — or man — is that the romantic love of one's twenties is largely the projection of one's own unfinished self onto a willing surface, and that is why it ends. The love of one's later years is something quite different. It is the daily, unglamorous decision to remain useful to one specific person, in their failures as in their triumphs, and to do this without keeping score and without rehearsing one's grievances in the silent hours.

Rainier and I had our difficulties — anyone who tells you a marriage of twenty-six years did not is selling a fiction. But we kept our promises. We raised three children together. We were, in the end, partners in the running of a small country and a private household and a public family, and I would not have traded my Prince for any leading man, any kingdom, any second chance. A man one can admire — that is what I would tell my daughters to look for. Not a man who admires you. A man you may admire in return.