Prince Harry's ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy has revealed motherhood 'saved me from myself' after years of avoiding marriage and children – admitting it was only when she met her now-husband Sam Cutmore-Scott that she knew she wanted to settle down.

The jewellery designer, 40, who dated the Duke of Sussex, 42, on and off for around seven years until 2011, admitted she spent her twenties and early thirties 'only committed to having fun'.

However, when she met hotelier Sam, 42, at 35, Chelsy said that for the first time she knew she wanted a family – 'specifically with him'.

The couple now have three children, Leo, four, Chloe, three, and six-month-old Finn.

'Looking back... commitment wasn't exactly my strong suit,' Chelsy wrote in a new blog on Tuesday. '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 added: '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.'

In the candid post, published on her Aya jewellery website this week as she reflected on the last decade before turning 41 next week, Chelsy continued: 'I was fiercely protective of my freedom. I didn't expect anybody to change their plans for me, and I certainly didn't want anybody expecting me to change mine for them.'

But she said her outlook shifted after Covid brought her globe-trotting lifestyle to a halt and she met Sam in 2020.

'Marriage and motherhood had never been particularly high on my to-do list,' she explained. '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 added: 'I was also 35 by then, so I can't give Sam all the credit. Timing, and possibly biology, may have played their part.'

Chelsy and Harry began dating in 2004 and had an on-off relationship for around seven years before finally splitting in 2011.

Their romance played out under intense scrutiny, with Chelsy later describing the attention as 'so full-on: crazy and scary and uncomfortable'.

She said in 2016: '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.'

The former lawyer remained on friendly terms with Harry and was among the guests at his 2018 wedding to Meghan Markle at St George's Chapel, Windsor.

Another of Harry's former girlfriends, actress and model Cressida Bonas, whom he dated from 2012 until 2014, was also at the ceremony.

Chelsy went on to marry Sam in a private ceremony in Mauritius in 2022.

Reflecting on how motherhood has changed her, Chelsy said: 'By the time I met Sam, I had travelled endlessly, lived abroad, met extraordinary people, stayed out far too late far too many times and lived life to the full... and then some.

'I sometimes say my children saved me from myself. Not because I think I was a terrible person before them. I wasn’t. And I certainly don’t look back at my twenties and early thirties with regret. Quite the opposite.

'I had an extraordinary amount of fun. But realistically, there was probably a limit to how long I could have continued on that trajectory.'

She continued: 'My children have restricted my freedom in almost every possible sense. They ruin plans, interrupt phone calls, make spontaneity almost impossible and are an absolutely astonishing financial drain on my existence.

'And I am completely and utterly obsessed with them.'

She also revealed that the anxiety motherhood brought was something she had not anticipated, describing the 'constant worry' over whether her children are safe and happy and the 'endless low-level anxiety that something might happen to them'.

In one frightening episode, her youngest son Finn contracted meningitis when he was just two weeks old.

Chelsy revealed she has spent just nine days away from Leo in nearly five years, five of them while she was in hospital with Finn.

She admitted the thought of spending even a night away from her children now 'fills me with dread' – something she said her friends find 'fairly entertaining'.

Chelsy and Sam have since moved with their family to Mauritius, where she continues to run Aya while juggling life with three small children.

Yet despite occasionally missing the freedom and spontaneity of her old life, she said: 'I loved that life, and I'm very glad I had it. I just wouldn't swap this one for it.'