God Bless This Mess(50)
As you know if you’ve seen the show, my promises to myself basically flew out the window.
I wound up kissing more men in one night than I’d kissed in my whole life. And I was surprised to find that it was fun. Over the course of the next few weeks, I kissed guys I might have never dated if I stayed in Alabama. I kissed men who weren’t my type, and I liked it! I also kissed men who I thought I didn’t want to kiss at all. As the people in charge, including host Chris Harrison, kept reminding me, they were making a TV show, and they needed me to “trust the process.”
Going outside my comfort zone was part of the adventure.
But man, it was exhausting.
Television production schedules are demanding. As the lead in the show, I was always on camera, which meant that the show kept me working all the time.
One morning in the first couple of weeks, I actually passed out on the way to get my makeup done. They took me to a hospital just to be safe, and I ended up being treated for exhaustion and dehydration (they showed part of this on Week 3), but as soon as I came out of the hospital, we had to keep filming to stay on schedule. Always the trooper, I got right back to work.
We were always rushing from one place to the next, and in between they were interviewing me on camera to get my impressions of everything that had just happened. I was surrounded by all of this beauty, but I hardly got a chance to enjoy it because we were at work. The Bachelor shows took me to eight different countries by the time I was finished: Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, the Netherlands, Scotland, Latvia, Greece, and then Mexico—where I made a guest appearance on Bachelor in Paradise—and I didn’t really get to experience any of them the way I had hoped.
I mean, I went bungee jumping, pretty much naked, with somebody I haven’t talked to since. That’s weird, right? That’s not a normal dating experience. It’s not a normal life experience! It was cool, but it’s not exactly a comfortable date with somebody who’s basically a stranger.
It looks like it’s all glamorous on TV. Believe me, I thought that’s what it would be. But it was hard. The lack of sleep and loss of contact with the outside world made me feel like I was losing my mind at times. There were days when I honestly couldn’t see straight, or think straight, but I kept going because I didn’t want to let anyone down. Especially myself.
It was week after week of some of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had—some of them amazing, which many people don’t get to experience in a lifetime, let alone a couple of months, and which I’ll treasure forever. I met a lot of great people, too. But that time period between March 3, when they first told me I was the new Bachelorette, through May, when we finished filming, and what happened in the weeks after the show started airing, were also some of the biggest emotional roller-coaster rides I’ve ever been on. I mean, even if you love roller coasters, if you ride them one after the other all day long every day for weeks on end, you might feel a little woozy!
People have asked me what it feels like to be dating so many men at once, and honestly, for the sake of the TV show, I learned to sort of turn off my feelings from one date to the next. If I had a great date with one of the guys, I would just shut those feelings down when it was over and put all of my attention into the next date. I wanted the guys to be comfortable, and the only way I could do that was to give them my full attention, so they would be real with me.
It was good for the show, I think. But it wasn’t necessarily good for figuring out what my heart really wanted.
One of the big differences between participating in one of these shows as a contestant and being the lead was that I didn’t have time to write in my journal. I no longer had any time to slow down, to really process how I was feeling, and how what I was feeling related to what I actually wanted. Even my interviews were more about narrating and explaining what was happening than they were about processing my feelings. So I didn’t get any of that therapy-like feeling I’d had on The Bachelor.
I was getting paid for The Bachelorette, too, so it really was a “job.” The people in charge were my bosses, and we were all responsible for making a season of extremely valuable television. There was a lot of pressure on everybody to get it right, and the spotlight of all of that pressure on me.
Something about being in that position made me go right back to my default setting of trying to be the “best” in the eyes of other people. (Funny how sometimes trying to be the “best” makes you feel the worst.) I wanted to make a really good TV show, but I also wanted to have a real experience, and to find true love.
That wasn’t the best combo for my heart.
Trying to do both of those things at once meant that there were times when I had to go against my intuition, to go against my gut, and to almost force myself to feel true feelings for men whom I didn’t have much more than a little crush on.
At the beginning, when I couldn’t see my husband in the room, I thought, Okay, I’m going to have faith. And, at some point down the line, the more I got to know the guys, the more I convinced myself there was really was something there with the men I chose going into the final four.
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If you didn’t watch my season and you want to know everything that happened on the show, by all means go watch it. (You should probably watch it before you keep reading, ’cause I’m about to give away some massive spoilers!)
I don’t want to rehash everything that happened. But I do want to talk about some of the big stuff. Looking back on it, what happened with the final four were matters of the heart. My real heart. The one that I would have no choice but to tend to long after this TV show was over.