Before Diana became Princess of Wales, Prince Charles came to Althorp for her older sister. Lady Sarah Spencer had spent time with him, appeared beside him in public, and learned what happens when a private royal friendship becomes rich material for the press. Then the relationship ended.
Three years later, when Charles and Diana announced their engagement, Sarah gave the press one polished, unforgettable line: “I introduced them. I’m Cupid.” At the time, it seemed playful.
After the marriage failed, it seemed ominous. But did Sarah truly see what Diana did not? Or have decades of tragedy made us place in Sarah’s hands knowledge she never claimed to possess?
The honest answer begins in November 1977 at Althorp, the Spencer family estate in Northamptonshire. Charles was 29, Sarah was 22, and Diana was 16. Charles had been invited for a country weekend during his relationship with Sarah, and Diana was simply the younger sister in the same house, living on the edge of a social world that connected the Spencers to the royal family.
This meeting would later be viewed as the opening scene of one of the 20th century’s most famous marriages. At the time, it was nothing of the sort. Some accounts describe it as the first meeting between Charles and Diana.
Published royal biographies note that the two families had known each other for years. The distinction matters. Diana did not suddenly enter royal society through a strange door.
She grew up near Sandringham, where her family rented Park House, and Windsor was always part of the distant landscape of her childhood.
Still, familiarity was not the same as readiness. Charles later remembered that Diana, at 16, was lively, amusing, and attractive. Diana remembered being surprised that a man of his position and age would take an interest in her.
These memories were recorded after the engagement, when every early encounter was searched for signs of destiny.
In November 1977, there was no engagement, no secret decision, and no immediate shift of affection between the sisters. Charles arrived at Althorp with Sarah. Diana was the younger sister he found charming.
The rest of the story had not happened yet. This is the first correction the story requires. Charles did not arrive at Althorp, notice Diana, and instantly conclude he had chosen the wrong Spencer sister.
The image is satisfying because it reduces years of uncertainty into one perfect moment. But the future did not announce itself that weekend.
Charles continued his life. Sarah remained the Spencer woman publicly linked to him. Diana returned to her own world.
Years passed before Charles began to see her as a serious potential wife. The important question is not whether Charles chose the wrong sister in 1977, but why a relatively short relationship with Sarah became the social gateway through which Diana entered a much larger system.
The Spencers were not strangers standing at the palace gates. Their family had served the crown for generations and belonged to the same aristocratic networks as the royal family. Diana’s father, John Spencer, had held a royal position as a knight before inheriting his earldom.
Her paternal grandmother, Cynthia Spencer, served Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, for nearly 35 years. Her maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, also held a respected place in the Queen Mother’s court. Diana and her siblings grew up with a genuine, personal, and longstanding connection to the royal family.
Park House, where Diana spent part of her childhood, sat on the Sandringham estate. Royal occasions, formal protocols, and expectations of service were not foreign to the family. Yet this background has often been used to suggest Diana should have understood what marrying Charles required.
That conclusion assumed too much. Mastering the etiquette of Sandringham was not enough to master the art of being Princess of Wales. A young woman might understand formal introductions, country weekends, and the unspoken rules of reception rooms without realizing what happens when her face becomes the focus of the world.
Sarah, as the eldest Spencer daughter, entered this world before Diana. Born in 1955, she was more than six years older than her youngest sister. By the mid-1970s, Sarah had come of age, moving through country houses, sporting circles, and social events where Charles regularly appeared.
When her father inherited the Spencer title in 1975, she became Lady Sarah Spencer. The title made it easy for the press to categorize her as aristocratic, well-connected, unmarried, and therefore eligible.
Charles was approaching 30, and speculation about his future wife had become a national hobby. Every eligible woman photographed near him was treated as a potential queen. A dinner, a polo match, a dance, even a ski holiday could be presented as evidence of a serious royal romance.
Sarah entered this world before Diana and learned how little control a woman had once the press decided the meaning of her relationship.
Contemporary reports later described Sarah as Charles’s former girlfriend. This confirms the relationship was deeper than a passing acquaintance, but it does not prove marriage was imminent. There is no reliable evidence that Charles proposed, that the palace formally selected her, or that she was one step from becoming Princess of Wales.
The relationship gained greater importance in later accounts because Diana followed in her footsteps. That historical sequence inflated the apparent significance of the beginning.
Charles and Sarah appeared together at social events, and the relationship attracted growing attention. A planned trip to Klosters in early 1978 intensified speculation. Royal journalists followed Charles closely, and Sarah was suddenly measured not just as a woman spending time with a man she knew, but as a potential royal bride.
Her appearance, behavior, family background, personal history, and every spontaneous remark became evidence of her suitability.
This change matters because it explains why a conversation with journalists became one of the pivotal episodes in Sarah’s public life. Later accounts say she spoke during a lunch with journalists Nigel Nelson and James Whitaker, answering questions with notable frankness. Among the statements attributed to her was the declaration that she would not marry a man she did not love, whether he was a dustman or the King of England.
The remark challenged the romantic narrative surrounding her.
The story is often told as if Sarah deliberately called the press and destroyed her future in one reckless interview. But the history of the sources is more complicated. The conversation first entered the journalistic world, then biographers and royal commentators republished it, sometimes with more certainty and detail than the original records support.
Sarah reportedly objected to the way her statements were obtained or presented. By that point, the press was no longer just covering the relationship. It was evaluating Sarah’s character.
Frankness that might have seemed refreshing in another young woman was treated as poor judgment because the man involved was the future king.
Sarah’s private experiences and alleged health struggles became part of the coverage. The young woman disappeared behind a public examination of whether she could stay silent, behave properly, and fit the imagined role. Before Diana became the most photographed woman in the world, Sarah went through a smaller version of the same transformation.
She became a candidate, and the candidate became a story.
Later accounts usually describe that publicity as the moment Charles ended the relationship. It is entirely possible that trust was damaged and that Charles disliked seeing private matters turn into headlines. A complete explanation from both parties has never been available.
The relationship may have ended because of scandal, incompatible expectations, lack of affection, bad timing, or several pressures combined. The public saw the consequences. The private decision was never fully told.
Sarah should not be reduced to a woman who lost a crown because she was too outspoken. That popular version assumes the crown was actually available and that she wanted it. Nor should she be portrayed as the brilliant older sister who diagnosed Charles, recognized the danger, and fled before Diana arrived.
Both versions give Sarah a level of knowledge and control the surviving records do not support. Her real story is quieter. She spent time with Charles.
The relationship became public. The publicity became damaging. The relationship ended before marriage.
Her attributed statement that she would only marry for love deserves the same caution. A woman saying she would not marry without love does not necessarily mean she rejected a proposal. It may simply mean there was no proposal and the newspapers had gone beyond the relationship itself.
The press saw a potential queen. Sarah seems to have described something less settled. The difference between those two versions, between what the relationship was and what the public needed it to become, would later surround Diana on a far larger scale.
Sarah now knew how royal attention could quickly remove the boundary between a woman and her role. Journalists were not only interested in her feelings toward Charles. They wanted to know if she was fit to be his wife, whether she had the right temperament, and whether her past would survive scrutiny.
Once the possibility of marriage leaked into the papers, every aspect of her life became constitutional evidence.
This experience gave Sarah knowledge about the media, but it did not necessarily give her knowledge about Charles’s future marriage. The danger of hindsight is real. It is natural to wonder whether Sarah later warned Diana.
She knew Charles socially and romantically for a period, experienced press attention, and understood that proximity to the spotlight had consequences. Yet general awareness of royal media exposure does not mean a specific warning exists. There is no reliable record of Sarah telling Diana that Charles was still emotionally attached to Camilla, urging her not to marry, or predicting the relationship would end in disaster.
The absence of such a warning is sometimes treated as suspicious, as if Sarah stayed silent despite knowing everything. That interpretation starts from the ending and works backward. Sarah may have considered her relationship with Charles a passing chapter that ended for reasons of its own.
She may have seen Diana’s later relationship as a different one unfolding under different circumstances. Families often recognize connections only after events make them clear. In reality, people rarely possess the full picture history later draws around them.
Diana was not simply waiting in Sarah’s shadow. By the late 1970s, she was building her own life in London, sharing a flat with friends and working with young children. She was shy at formal events, but she was not lacking in independence, humor, wisdom, or personal hopes.
The familiar image of Diana as an unformed girl may be as misleading as the image of Sarah as a seasoned sister who understood everything. Diana had little romantic experience and was much younger than Charles. These facts matter, but she was not an empty space moved between families and institutions without desires of her own.
The next significant phase between Charles and Diana began in 1980, not during the Althorp weekend three years earlier. Lord Mountbatten, Charles’s great-uncle and beloved mentor, was killed in 1979. Later accounts describe Diana speaking sympathetically to Charles about his grief at another country gathering.
She reportedly told him he looked lonely at the funeral and expressed concern. Whether every word was preserved accurately remains uncertain, but the emotional shift is clear. Charles began to see Diana not just as Sarah’s younger sister, but as a young woman capable of warmth and care.
His interest grew, invitations followed, including time aboard the royal yacht and a visit to Balmoral. The relationship began to take on unmistakable significance. Even then, romance and assessment ran side by side.
Diana was being known as a person and studied as a potential wife for the heir to the throne.
By this point, Sarah’s life had moved in another direction. On May 17, 1980, she married Neil Edmund McCorquodale. That was before Charles and Diana’s relationship became the talk of the following months, and before their engagement.
The date corrects one of the most common myths about the sisters. Sarah was not standing by while Charles shifted his attention from her to Diana. She had already chosen another life.
Neil came from a distinguished family, but the marriage remained far from the daily media attention that would soon surround Diana. Sarah kept her privileges and social connections, yet her adult life was not organized around the demands of the Prince of Wales. Her marriage lasted while Charles and Diana’s later collapsed.
The contrast is striking, but it should not be taken as proof that Sarah was predicting the future. People do not choose their life partners based on knowledge of how every alternative path ends.
Sarah’s relationship with Charles ended, she married Neil, and Charles’s relationship with Diana developed later. These facts are enough to support hidden calculations that Sarah realized royal marriage was a trap, and that her deliberate choice of safety would replace her real choices with a fabricated lesson after Diana’s suffering became known. The woman history now calls “the one before Diana” had already left the love story before the world began treating it as national drama.
Sarah did not spend the early 1980s waiting for Charles, competing with Diana, or presenting herself as the rejected first choice. She was building a marriage and a family while her younger sister, the one she had once introduced to Charles, became one of the most famous women alive. As Charles and Diana’s relationship accelerated, the differences between the sisters became useful to the press.
Sarah was older, more outspoken, and already marked by an uncomfortable experience with the spotlight. Diana was younger, quieter in interviews, and presented as untouched by romantic scandal.
These images simplified both women, but they suited the needs of the royal bride narrative. Diana’s youth, apparent modesty, aristocratic background, and limited romantic history were treated as evidence of suitability. Sarah’s experience showed what happened when a potential bride spoke too frankly.
At first, Diana seemed to reveal little to the press while maintaining a captivating image. Her shyness could be portrayed as innocence. Her work with children proved her maternal tenderness.
Her family background reassured the institution. The qualities that made Sarah seem risky after the interview made Diana seem safer to an establishment looking for a future queen.
This did not require a secret plan. Systems often guide choices without a covert meeting or written instructions. Charles was under increasing pressure to marry.
The press understood which qualities made a royal bride compelling. Families understood the importance of the match. Diana met many of the expectations placed before her, and Charles showed genuine interest in her.
Both realities could coexist.
The speed of the engagement remains striking. Diana was invited to Balmoral, observed within the family circle, and pursued by photographers as speculation grew. The young woman once described as one of Sarah’s younger sisters became known as Lady Di.
Her clothes, movements, expressions, workplace, and private reactions attracted international attention. Sarah had experienced how quickly her relationship with Charles became a public matter. Now Diana faced the same mechanism on a scale no Spencer woman had ever seen.
What did Sarah do? The strongest contemporary evidence comes from Sarah herself after the engagement was announced. She said she introduced Charles and Diana in ordinary family language.
Introducing two people can mean creating the social setting in which they first met. Sarah’s connection to Charles clearly helped bring him into Diana’s close circle. That role was real, but an introduction does not mean arranging a romance.
Sarah was not controlling the renewed meetings in 1980, Charles’s growing interest, Diana’s response, the Balmoral visit, the proposal, or the institutional approval surrounding it. She opened a social door. Charles and Diana made their own decisions after crossing it.
Keeping this distinction clear also protects Diana’s agency. If Sarah simply handed Charles to her younger sister, Diana becomes a replacement rather than a person. But the records show something more complex.
Charles’s view of Diana developed over time. Diana responded to his interest, his vulnerability, and what the relationship seemed to promise. She entered the engagement under enormous pressure, but she was not transferred between two adults like an object.
It is also unfair to hold Sarah responsible for not preventing the marriage. An older sister can advise, question, or worry, but she cannot see a future that has not yet formed. Sarah’s previous relationship with Charles did not automatically reveal every emotional attachment in his life.
Knowing him socially and dating him for a period does not mean he explained the Camilla story to her, or that Sarah understood the place Camilla would later occupy in the royal marriage. Camilla’s later importance has caused every woman who knew Charles before Diana to be reexamined as a potential witness. What did Sarah see?
What must she have known? The questions are understandable because the public wants to spot any early indicator. But the question becomes misleading when possibility turns into fact.
In February 1981, Charles proposed to Diana. The engagement remained secret for several weeks while arrangements were made and Diana traveled. On February 24, the palace announced the news.
The reaction was enormous. Britain met a 19-year-old aristocratic bride from a family considered suitable for a future queen. Charles was 32.
The age gap was obvious, but the national celebration was festive.
For viewers looking back, the engagement interview may seem full of warnings. Charles’s famous hesitation when asked whether the couple was in love has been repeated so often it now sounds like an announcement of failure. Diana’s confidence seems fragile because the public knows what followed.
But in 1981, that exchange was generally folded into a story of royal awkwardness and romantic promise. Looking backward changes the emotional tone of old footage.
Sarah’s reaction underwent the same transformation. On February 25, The Guardian described Lady Sarah McCorquodale as Prince Charles’s former girlfriend and published her response: “I introduced them. I’m Cupid.”
The statement confirmed that Sarah accepted her role in bringing the couple together. Her tone was light. There was no warning, confession, regret, or hint that she believed her sister was making a mistake.
At that moment, Cupid meant a successful introduction. Sarah was a married older sister receiving news the country considered happy. Her words matched the optimism of the engagement.
They did not seem ominous because the ending had not happened yet.
No one hearing her in February 1981 could connect separation, divorce, or the Paris tunnel accident to a sentence spoken before the wedding. After the separation in 1992, the divorce in 1996, and Diana’s death in 1997, the same words sounded different. “I’m Cupid” began to resemble a line from a woman who unleashed a tragedy without knowing it.
A joke became an omen, and an introduction became an act with consequences. Sarah’s meaning had not changed, but the public had re-read the phrase through sixteen years of grief.
This is one way famous disasters rewrite the characters of people who stood near their beginnings. The public searched the early chapters for someone who might have noticed the ending. Sarah seems the perfect candidate.
She knew Charles first, experienced his attention, and dealt with royal correspondents. Later generations concluded she understood what Diana was walking into. But Sarah’s real experience may have taught her something narrower.
It may have shown her that dating Charles brought intrusive publicity, that indiscretion could be punished, and that the press could turn a young woman into a test of compatibility. Those lessons were serious, but they were not knowledge that Charles and Diana’s marriage would become emotionally devastating, or that Camilla would later dominate every interpretation of it.
The myth also depends on portraying the sisters as opposites. Sarah is older, worldly, and impossible to fool. Diana is innocent, submissive, and unable to see danger.
But real sisters are not classified so neatly. Sarah had her own vulnerabilities, some of which the media exposed. Diana trusted others, but she also had strong instincts, made difficult decisions, and eventually challenged the system around her.
What separated them most was not intelligence but timing. Sarah met Charles when he was an adult closer to her own age. Before the pressure to marry reached its peak, their relationship remained private enough to end without legal consequences.
Diana entered serious consideration at 19, when the search for a bride had become more urgent and the media was ready to turn their romance into national theater.
The same man could represent something entirely different to each sister. For Sarah, Charles was an eligible bachelor in a familiar social world, though surrounded by unusual attention. For Diana, Charles became the gateway to a role combining marriage, monarchy, duty, motherhood, and public symbolism.
Sarah’s relationship remained a chapter in her life. Diana’s quickly became a national matter. This difference explains why Sarah’s later marriage cannot simply be compared to Diana’s as proof that one sister chose better than the other.
The two women were not offered the same relationship under the same conditions. Dating Charles in the late 1970s and marrying the Prince of Wales in 1981 were entirely different experiences.
Sarah’s role in Diana’s life did not end when the wedding procession left St. Paul’s Cathedral. Sarah did not disappear into resentment, and the sisters did not publicly become rivals.
By then, Sarah was married and raising her own family. Diana had entered a world where every expression could be photographed and every personal difficulty turned into public interpretation. Their circumstances as adults were completely different, but family bonds continued away from the spotlight.
As the 1980s progressed, Sarah’s early relationship with Charles became a curiosity rather than the focus of her life. Journalists kept mentioning it because the parallel was irresistible. Charles had dated one Spencer sister and married the other.
Yet the nature of the sisters’ relationship was not defined by that headline. Sarah was not a rejected first choice watching from a distance. She was Diana’s older sister, and that role mattered more.
As Diana’s royal life became more difficult, the public often preferred simple categories of loyalty and blame. Families rarely experience crises in such clear arrangements. Diana’s marital problems, separation interviews, divorce, and battles over public reputation did not occupy Sarah as a spectator watching a royal scandal.
They occupied her as Diana’s sister, as an aunt to Diana’s children, and as a member of the family into which both women were born. The old story about Charles and Sarah could not cover the complexity of what followed.
That complexity became painfully clear in August 1997. After Diana’s death in Paris, Sarah traveled there with her sister Jane and Prince Charles to accompany Diana’s body back to Britain. The group carried with them nearly twenty years of history: the former husband, the two sisters, the royal family, and the Spencer family, brought together by a death that dominated world headlines.
For Sarah, the journey placed the man who had once come to Althorp for her beside the body of the sister who later married him. No reliable account reveals Sarah’s private thoughts during those hours, and none is needed. The facts are enough.
Sarah had been socially present at the beginning of Charles and Diana’s story. Now she was helping bring Diana home after its most painful final chapter. This is the strongest emotional truth of Sarah’s story, and it does not depend on predictions.
She did not need to foresee the marriage’s failure for the Paris journey to be painful. She did not need to know anything secret about Charles or Camilla. Sarah was the older sister confronting the loss of her younger sister, whose path had crossed Charles’s through Sarah’s own place in the family.
Sarah attended Diana’s funeral and later helped manage her estate. She served as chair of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund. These were not honorary titles attached to a famous name.
They involved responsibility, scrutiny, charitable decisions, and difficult questions about how to protect and use Diana’s memory. Sarah’s role in her sister’s story extended far beyond the five words spoken after the engagement. The memorial fund supported significant charitable work before winding up its administrative operations at the end of 2012.
Sarah’s work placed her at the center of the quiet labor that follows public mourning: meetings, accounts, legal matters, conflicting expectations, and decisions that could never satisfy everyone who believed Diana belonged to them.
The woman remembered for one youthful encounter with the press later helped manage one of the most sensitive estates in modern royal history. Her subsequent reticence is striking. Sarah did not build a public career on explaining Charles’s character, interpreting Diana’s marriage, or revealing what she supposedly knew.
The painful publicity of 1978 may have made her more guarded, but Sarah never offered that explanation publicly as fact. What can be observed is that she largely kept her personal life private, appearing only when family responsibilities required her presence.
This silence has sometimes frustrated audiences looking for the missing scene. They want Sarah to explain what she saw in Charles, why the relationship ended, whether she warned Diana, and how she felt when “I’m Cupid” acquired its darker meaning. But silence is not evidence of a secret confession.
Sometimes it is simply a boundary a person places around experiences the public has claimed as its own.
Sarah’s story reveals something larger than an unfinished romance. It shows how quickly a young woman close to Charles could be assessed as a potential partner. It shows how the press could turn rumor into exclusion.
It shows how family networks placed eligible women near Charles long before the public understood how those connections would interlock. And it shows how a failed royal marriage could send history searching for a witness who never claimed to know the ending.
Because Sarah married Neil and lived away from the royal spotlight, she later became an imagined alternative for Diana. Viewers could look at Sarah’s relatively private marriage and imagine another future: a husband outside the monarchy, children raised without constitutional expectations, and marital problems that never became world news. This comparison is emotionally understandable, but it is impossible to prove.
Sarah’s life was not a choice Diana could simply have made. They were two different women making decisions at different ages under different pressures.
Sarah’s relative privacy does not prove she recognized the price of Diana’s future in advance. It proves that marrying the heir to the throne was not merely a more public version of ordinary marriage. It was a different structure, carrying obligations and media coverage that turned every personal difficulty into official news.
This brings us back to Althorp. The November 1977 weekend matters, but not as the beginning of a fairy tale or a scene where Charles chose between two sisters. Its importance lies in revealing how small the social circle around the future marriage was.
Charles came to Diana through Sarah, and Diana was present within a family trusted by the institution. Nothing was decided, yet the ingredients for a future royal marriage were already in the same house. No one needed to know the ending for the system to move forward.
Sarah did not need to arrange a marriage. Charles did not need to choose Diana in 1977. Diana did not need to grasp the scale of the role ahead of her.
Social proximity was the first step. Time, grief, attraction, family approval, institutional expectation, and popular pressure completed the rest.
Later, history compressed the sequence into a line that is accurate but incomplete. Charles dated Sarah, then married Diana. Sarah and Charles had a documented relationship in contemporary reports, though its precise emotional depth remains uncertain.
The publicity seems to have damaged it, but no complete private account proves that one interview alone ended everything. Sarah moved on and married Neil before Charles and Diana’s relationship became publicly serious. Charles met Diana again at Althorp while involved with Sarah, but he did not immediately begin courting her younger sister.
Years separated that weekend from the start of serious courtship.
Those years matter because they prevent Sarah from becoming a rejected experiment and Diana from becoming an immediate replacement. They also restore the uncertainty that existed before the events. In hindsight, every early moment seems to lead directly toward St.
Paul’s Cathedral. The “Cupid” comparison is accurate and incomplete. Sarah said she introduced Charles and Diana, but she did not say she engineered the relationship, steered Charles toward her sister, or persuaded Diana to accept him.
She did not claim to have tested Charles first, and she expressed no regret. The introduction is part of the historical record. The broader story was written later by people looking for a single beginning to explain a vast ending.
For older viewers who remember the engagement as news rather than history, the original mood is essential. In February 1981, Diana was presented as the answer to years of speculation. Her family connections seemed reassuring, her youth was celebrated, and her modest public image seemed appropriate.
Sarah’s comment matched the optimism of that time because the public believed she had contributed to a happy outcome. The country was not yet asking which sister understood Charles better. It was welcoming a future Princess of Wales.
The doubts that seem obvious now were not embedded in the story presented to the public. There may have been private concerns, but concern is not the same as foresight. Later knowledge cannot be placed in Sarah’s mouth simply because the public wishes someone had spoken.
What remains is enough. Sarah knew Charles before Diana knew him as a suitor. Their relationship helped create the conditions in which Charles met her younger sister.
Sarah suffered royal press attention before Diana faced it on a vast scale. She married Neil, welcomed the engagement publicly, remained part of Diana’s family, traveled to Paris after her death, and helped carry the responsibility of her legacy.
Sarah’s significance is not that she was the woman who almost became queen. It is the position she occupied. Between a private relationship and a public role.
Between the optimism of 1981 and the grief of 1997. Between the social beginning of Charles and Diana’s story and the family work that followed its end. She became the place where the public imagined history might have taken a different turn.
The fairest conclusion is not that Sarah survived what Diana was too innocent to see. The two sisters met the same man at different times under entirely different circumstances. Sarah’s relationship ended before it gained institutional weight.
Diana’s was asked to support an heir, a monarchy, and a national image carrying the hopes of millions. One relationship could simply end. The other had to bear a heavy burden.
On the day Sarah called herself Cupid, she could not have imagined how those words would sound sixteen years later. History allows us to say she introduced Charles and Diana and publicly celebrated their engagement. It does not allow us to turn her into a prophet, a secret opponent of the marriage, or the woman who deliberately sent her sister toward disaster.
Sarah opened a social door. Many people, under different pressures, shaped the path that followed.
The story of Lady Sarah Spencer begins before Diana, but it does not compete with her. Sarah knew Charles first and saw earlier how royal attention could turn a young woman into a public instrument. Yet there is no reliable evidence that she understood the future love triangle or that she possessed a warning capable of changing everything.
Her story is affecting because it shows how ordinary choices become historical ones without the people involved realizing what history will demand of them.