God Bless This Mess(4)
That’s what I’m good at. When that internal pressure hits, I know how to turn it on. But these guys didn’t know the Perfect Pageant Patty version of me. They had only ever seen me let loose on Colton’s season. So when the time came for me to be the center of the show, the lead, the girl in charge of the situation, I did what needed to get done. I said what needed to get said. I smiled when I needed to smile. I poured my heart out when the situation required it.
But my true feelings? The real me? Where was she?
The answer’s kind of murky.
I had always believed that when you meet somebody you’re gonna have a spark with, you just know. And I didn’t really get that feeling from any of the guys who got out of those limos.
Okay, I kept thinking. Nice guy. Next one.
Before the show started, before I gave up using my phone for those weeks, I had seen pictures of some of the potential suitors when they were leaked online by certain members of Bachelor Nation. (If you don’t know, Bachelor Nation is what we call the rabid fan base in the social-media universe that follows every in and out of the show’s existence, going back to the series’ beginnings more than fifteen years ago.)
One of the guys I was kind of intrigued by was Tyler. He was really good-looking, and I wanted to find out what he was all about, but I kept waiting for him and waiting for him, to the point where I was standing there with my feet aching and my gown wet in the freezing cold—’cause it gets cold at night where the Bachelor mansion is located, high in Agoura Hills—thinking he must’ve been cut. But he finally showed up sometime after midnight. And the first thing I thought was, Whoa! I think he’s been drinking!
It turns out he hadn’t. He was just full of nervous energy. And when I finally got to gaze into his eyes, I felt a little connection. I felt a little spark. I felt a little connection with Jed, and with Luke, too, who I had met before this season even started.
But when the guys were all inside, I stepped through a side door into an interview room far from any of the guys’ sight. While I was sitting there with my feet in a bucket of warm water, in a robe, clutching my Sulley pillow (you know, the cartoon character from the movies Monsters, Inc. and Monsters University) as someone blow-dried my gown again, that’s when I thought, I don’t think he’s here.
I had heard about a previous Bachelorette who was disappointed on her first night because she didn’t like any of the guys, and now she was married to one of them. But I didn’t know that girl. I didn’t know much of anything about what I had gotten myself into. I had never watched the show before joining Colton’s season.
“Everybody kind of feels this way at first,” I was reassured.
Wanting to be the good girl, wanting to prove that I could be the best Bachelorette ever, wanting to do anything I could not to disappoint anybody, I convinced myself to believe that somehow, this would all work out—and if I had a little faith, then maybe one of these guys would turn out to be the one after all.
“Okay,” I said with a great big smile. And as a makeup artist made one final attempt to cover Marcus, I tipped my head back and asked, “Is there a booger in my nose?”
As I stepped back into in my blow-dried dress and those achy high heels, moments before walking to a room to see all thirty of those guys who had come to meet me, I knew I would need to make a speech. I’d started to work on the speech that day, and I had a pretty good idea that the guys—and all of Bachelor Nation—would expect me to say certain things. So I got ready to say all of those things in my speech, while trying to figure out how say them in my own words. I’d made plenty of speeches during my beauty-pageant career, which had ended only a year before this all started. I could be charming. I could be engaging. I wasn’t afraid of public speaking at all. Pageants had given me that important life skill. But the idea that I might want to say something hopeful about seeing my husband in that room? It just wasn’t sitting right with me.
So I changed it.
After thanking the guys for stepping away from their lives to have this uncharted adventure with me, I told them that I had come on The Bachelor to find my forever love—but what I’d actually found was myself. “I’m human, and so are you,” I said. “I’m not looking for perfect. I’m looking for real. True love isn’t perfect. It’s beautiful, but it’s also messy.”
I looked around the room, making eye contact, trying desperately to make a real connection with someone, anyone. And I said, “In the few moments we’ve had together, you guys have made me feel like I deserve this. And for that I’m grateful for each and every one of you. I’m blown away . . . and I can see my husband being in this room.”
Instead of saying “My husband is in this room,” like I thought I was supposed to say, and instead of being honest and saying, “I just don’t think any of you guys are it for me!” I found a safe middle ground: “I can see my husband being in this room.”
(Safe. That’s a word that comes up a lot with me.)
“Now raise your glass to find true, imperfect love!” I said. And we all raised our glasses of champagne.
Did I wish that my husband was in that room? Sure! Did I want true love? Absolutely! I’d grown up hearing all the crazy twists and turns various people took on the road to finding love, including the wild stories of what some people in the Bible went through on their journeys of faith, and I wanted to believe that there was no way God would put me through everything I’d been through—and put me on this show—if it wasn’t going to lead to meeting the man of my dreams.