The 46-year-old resident of Lillestrøm, where he and Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby once shared an apartment, still doesn't want his name to appear in print. But he agreed to talk to journalists Frode Hansen and Tommy Fossum, who have written the book.
"Every time I look around inside a store, I see her face on the front page of magazines," he told local newspaper Romerikes Blad. "It's not possible to just close your eyes to it.
"I just have to accept that I'll never be finished with her."
He first met the 15-year-younger Mette-Marit at a popular Oslo nightclub called Kristiania. He said they lived together for awhile in his apartment building in Lillestrøm, a working-class town on the train line northeast of Oslo.
He also said they were engaged, and planned to travel to Las Vegas to get married. That never happened. He said he didn't want to discuss why their relationship ended.
He added that he only has good things to say about Mette-Marit. "Only superlatives," he said. "Not a bad word." He declined, however, to say whether he'd had contact with the crown princess in recent years.
He isn't the father of Mette-Marit's son Marius. Her son is the product of a short-lived romance that came later. She was a single mother when she met Crown Prince Haakon, with whom she's since had a daughter. They're now expecting another baby in December.
The Lillestrom man said it didn't come as a big shock that she would marry the heir to Norway's throne. "Through the media I'd known they'd become a couple," he said. "And I know that Mette-Marit generally gets what she wants."
