God Bless This Mess(45)
Who are you going to be, Hannah? I was thinking. Are you going to be your full self? Or the cookie-cutter version that probably got you this one-on-one in the first place?
So far I had turned into Pageant Patty in front of the cameras—putting on the smile, saying the right things—and I didn’t know how to get out of it. I felt stuck. How could I be myself with cameras up my nostrils?
When the first date aired, people made fun of me, saying it was the most cringeworthy date they had ever seen. And what they were really cringing at was me trying to figure out how to be me. They handed us glasses of champagne to make a toast, in the middle of the desert, in a jacuzzi, with a guy I’d only talked to twice since I’d arrived.
It wasn’t as cringeworthy in real life as it looked on TV, but it was pretty cringeworthy.
Actually, that was an important moment for me. In that hot tub I realized that the polished, put-together, say-the-right-thing Pageant Patty me wasn’t going to work on this show, and it wasn’t what I wanted to give to this potential relationship. I decided to try to let my walls down, and to do that, I had to feel the awkward in between. And as I made that shift, I was basically a little doe in the headlights of the cameras.
There was all kinds of drama in the house with the other girls, and they aired a lot of that on TV. It honestly didn’t make me look very good. I didn’t have my phone when we were filming, but once I was home and started watching the show, I made the mistake of going on social media and getting a very harsh introduction to what it’s like to be on the receiving end of haters in Bachelor Nation. A lot of people out there absolutely hated me based on what they saw on TV. These perfect strangers were calling me names that I will not repeat in public. I got hundreds of DMs saying the most horrible things about me. I even got a couple of death threats.
All of it made me feel terrible. I wasn’t a celebrity. I’d never been on TV before. I had no training in this. I didn’t have a manager or a publicist. I had no idea how to turn that noise off or filter it out. Every single comment and message hurt me personally.
But when we were filming, I didn’t think about how things might look on TV, or look to other people. I kept my focus on Colton.
Still, I kept getting the feeling that something was off. A feeling like he didn’t even want to be kissing me, you know? Some of the other girls felt like something was off, too, and honestly I didn’t know what to think. Was he interested in me at all? We even had one conversation when I told him straight up (just like we’d promised to do for each other) that I was having doubts. After all the drama in the house, and as things were progressing while we had so little actual time together, I gave him this analogy: “I feel like I’m on this cliff. And with all the drama that’s happened, I feel like I want to back away from the edge. Either that or I just want to jump, and really allow myself to start giving my heart to you.”
And Colton looked at me and said, “Hannah, jump. I’ve already jumped. Jump with me.”
It was so reassuring to hear him say that. I decided to try and put my fears away.
Still, the next time I had a chance to talk with him, it seemed to me like he still had some doubts about the two of us. So I asked him, “Do you remember what you said? Like, are we on the same page?” And once again, he answered, “Yeah.”
So eventually, I started to allow myself to have feelings for him.
I would have never opened my heart to him at all if he hadn’t said those things to me. Okay, I told myself. He’s honest. He’s somebody I can trust.
That’s why I told Colton that I was falling for him. I opened up my heart and my mouth and let him know how much I liked him. It was a risky thing to do. It may have been too soon. I was serious about being there. I wanted it to work so bad. Maybe I was trying to push myself to feel more than I was feeling.
But the night after I said it, he gave me a rose—and I absolutely took that as an affirmation that he was falling for me, too.
Oh, God, I thought, feeling really hopeful about it. We’re on the same page!
Finally.
*
One thing I wanted to talk about with Colton, more than anything else, was his faith. Other than saying he was a virgin, he didn’t reveal very much about his faith on TV. Religion and spirituality didn’t seem to be something anyone talked about on The Bachelor. But I needed to know where he stood.
As far as I was concerned, we couldn’t have a real relationship if we weren’t aligned on faith. Being able to talk about Jesus was up at the top of my list of potential husband-material traits. But I’m not sure if many of the people working on that TV show understood. It was the first time in my life I was ever surrounded by so many people who didn’t go to church, and some of them openly told me that they didn’t believe in God. And that was okay with me. I found it really interesting talking to people with different perspectives than mine. But still, “my family, my friends back home in Alabama, that’s the first thing they’re gonna ask him,” I said. “And if I haven’t had this conversation with him, I can’t bring him home.”
When Colton asked me, on my second one-on-one date, to go to meet his family—which, if you aren’t familiar with how things work on The Bachelor, was a really big deal—I thought, Oh, wow.
He had given me a rose, week after week. We were getting toward the end of filming. I thought for sure this meant that he was serious about me, and felt good about me, because he’d promised he would be honest with me. He said we were “good” every time I asked him. Getting invited on that date made me think for sure that I was gonna be in the top four, which would lead us to hometowns, where he would come to Alabama and meet my family. And I was so serious about it, my heart started racing. I kept thinking about the time we had spent together, and what it felt like when we kissed, and what it would be like for the two of us to be together outside of the show.