Marriage
On 2 February 2002, he married Máxima Zorreguieta Cerruti (born 17 May 1971) at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. Máxima is an Argentine woman of Spanish and Italian ancestry who prior to their marriage worked as an investment banker in New York City. The marriage triggered significant controversy due to the bride's father's prior role in the Argentinian military dictatorship.
The prince is a direct descendant of Anne, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange, eldest daughter of British King George II. However, under the British Act of Settlement, Prince Willem-Alexander forfeited his (distant) succession rights to the throne of the United Kingdom, because he married a Roman Catholic.
Read more about this topic: Willem-Alexander, Prince Of Orange
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“With my desire to write he seemed in full sympathy, and in urging our early marriage he argued that my first necessity was leisure in which to develop and to master my craft. It appeared to me that with such a man as teacher and guide I could not fail, and it was in a queer mixture of young love and vaulting ambition that I became a wife.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“And what if my descendants lose the flower
Through natural declension of the soul,
Through too much business with the passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“In mid-life the man wants to see how irresistible he still is to younger women. How they turn their hearts to stone and more or less commit a murder of their marriage I just don’t know, but they do.”
—Patricia Neal (b. 1926)