In 1963, Princess Marijke changed to using her second name, Christina. Pursuing her gift for music, at age 21 she moved to Canada to study classical music in Montreal. After a few years, she accepted a teaching position at a Montessori school in New York City. There, living an ordinary life under the name Christina Van Oranje, the Dutch Princess met and fell in love with a Havana born Cuban exile named Jorge Guillermo, himself a teacher for the Addie May Collins Shelter of Harlem.
Although societal attitudes were changing, because Mr. Guillermo was a Roman Catholic, it was still possible that any marriage could cause another public scandal in the Netherlands such as the one that occurred in 1964 when her sister, Princess Irene married a Catholic from Spain. Accordingly, Princess Christina, at that time ninth in line for the Dutch throne, renounced her and her children's rights to the throne before converting to Catholicism and officially announcing her engagement on Valentine’s Day, 1975.
Married on June 28, 1975, in Utrecht Cathedral in The Netherlands, the newlyweds rode through the streets of the city to the cheers of thousands of Dutch citizens. Following their marriage, she and her husband chose to live in New York but later moved to her native land where they built a home on an estate in Wassenaar, near the Hague.
Their children:
Divorced in 1996, Princess Christina returned with her children to live in the United States.
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