God Bless This Mess(46)

I had kissed only four boys in my life before I kissed Colton. This wasn’t something I took lightly. I was there for marriage, and I kept thinking, Am I ready for this?

I was certain he was thinking he was ready for it, because that’s what he told me week after week. That he was ready. That we could take this leap together.

But as soon as I got in the car to go on that date, I got this feeling in my gut that something was wrong. I didn’t know what it was, but something just felt off. It’s like we just weren’t connecting the way we were supposed to. We were two very different people. Had I been fooling myself?

I should have listened to that feeling.

But I didn’t. I kept thinking that being loved by this guy who was perfect for me on paper would be the right thing to happen. It would solve all of those insecurities. He seemed like the right person to love.

Instead, I tried to open up and connect with him on a deeper lever than I already had.

I sat down to dinner in a pretty pink Rachel Zoe dress that the show provided, and I said to Colton, “There’s something that I’ve been wanting to ask you: I need to know if you’re a man of God and what your relationship with Jesus is like before I take you home.”

Colton didn’t seem taken aback by my question. He talked to me about it. He was open and honest about it, and I suddenly felt so much better. My worry and fears went away. “You know,” I said with a great big smile, “I feel so much more confident taking you home now.”

In that moment, it felt like the floodgates of a loving relationship opened between us. It was as if talking about faith just released his heart, and he went into this monologue filled with some of the nicest things anybody’s ever said to me.

And then he paused, and his whole demeanor changed, and he said, “But I can’t get to where you are.”

“Wait, what?” I said.

All of a sudden, after saying all these things about how special I was, he started talking about all the reasons it wasn’t going to work between us.

I thought for a quick minute that maybe he had misunderstood the whole idea of “where I was,” so I tried to make it clear: “I’m not in love with you, but, like, I am falling for you,” I said. And he looked really uncomfortable when I said it.

“Yeah, I just . . .”

He started trying to explain himself, and it felt so awkward that I stopped him.

“Whoa,” I said. “I thought we were on the same page, or I would never have said that. I would never have allowed myself to say it if I didn’t feel like you were there with me.”

I had set my bar of honesty high from the start, and apparently he had ducked right under it. In a matter of minutes, he busted all of my trust issues wide open—and I was mad.

He broke up with me, and I was like, “You know, I am glad you told me now.”

In a way, I really was glad he did it. I would much rather know early on that someone’s been withholding their true feelings than to find out after we got engaged.

But when Colton put me in the limo to send me home, all of the hurt and rejection I had ever felt came rushing up from inside of me. I thought about Brady, and how much he’d said he loved me, and yet somehow I wasn’t enough for him. I thought about the pageants, and how many times I’d been told I had something “special,” but that my “special” wasn’t enough to win. I hated the feeling of not being enough for this guy. Or any guy. And I just went off about it.

“I’m f’in’ pissed,” I said. “I don’t think his actions and his words really add up.”

And I broke down in tears while holding my head high.

“It’s just really frustrating,” I said. “The desire in my heart is to be loved so fearlessly by somebody. I will not allow myself to not feel chosen every single day—and I’ll wait till whenever that is.”

*

When the breakup episode aired on TV, I think it was the first time anyone in Bachelor Nation started to take me seriously. I spoke so clearly and so articulately about what had happened and what I was feeling, there were people on social media who thought I must have been reading from a script. But that wasn’t the case at all. I just spoke from my heart—my scarred, dented, bruised-up heart.

What people didn’t know about me then were the things I’ve shared with you in this book. The audience didn’t know about the double breaking of trust that I’d suffered less than a year before I went on The Bachelor. It probably seemed silly to some people that I was so mad and upset about losing a guy I’d just met on a TV show. But the violation of trust that I experienced from Colton, a man who had specifically promised to be honest with me, opened up some old scars.

For other people, my little monologue in the limo turned into a feminist manifesto. It was wild. Clips of my limo-ride exit went viral, and all of a sudden people on social media, and in old-fashioned media, too, were calling me a good example of a modern feminist. They kept talking about how important it was for women to stand up for themselves the way I’d stood up for myself on the show.

Overnight I went from being a reality-TV pariah to becoming a public figure revered for my strength as a woman.

I can’t even begin to tell you how good it felt to be received so positively by so many people, and to feel connected with so many people. As if all of these other women got me; as if I’d said what so many women should—but don’t always—say when our love is treated carelessly.