God Bless This Mess(51)
After weeks of traveling and group dates and one-on-ones, my attraction to Peter Weber had grown like crazy. He was just so sweet, and I was developing some really strong feelings for him. But I was frustrated, because we never seemed to have enough time together to actually talk. On some of the other dates on the show, there was downtime when the camera crews and lighting crews were busy getting ready to shoot, when I would get a few minutes to talk to my dates off camera. I enjoyed some of those off-camera talks more than the on-camera ones, since it felt like we were really getting to know each other like we might in everyday life. But for some reason, that almost never happened with Peter.
Which leads me to the whole windmill situation.
By the time we got to Greece, and the show put us up in our Fantasy Suite in the base of a rustic old-stone windmill, we were just hungry for some alone time to get to know each other on a more personal level.
Neither one of us went in there thinking we were going to have sex. It was weird at first. I carried my Sulley pillow with me. It took a while to remember that we could talk openly, and that neither one of us was wearing a microphone. We played cards for a while, and he taught me this magic trick that his grandfather had taught him, which he said he had never taught anybody before. And I don’t know if it was a release from all the pressure I’d been under, or a result of all the intensity of dating and kissing so many men at the same time all those weeks, or if it was just our natural chemistry together, but once we got really comfortable and connected with each other, we got into that little double bed between the stone walls, and one thing led to another.
It was intimate, and fun. And we promised not to tell anyone about it, because we wanted to keep it real. This wasn’t something we did for the cameras, or the show, or the fans. We both said we wanted to keep it between us.
I had never slept with anybody so quickly in a relationship, ever, and the morning after my Fantasy Suite night with Peter I definitely felt some good-girl guilt about it. I was conflicted, because I really did have feelings for Peter. I was definitely falling in love with him. I just hadn’t had enough time to know for sure if what I felt for him was real, and I was worried I didn’t have much time left to decide whether I wanted to have a life with this man. With any of the men, really.
Three nights later, in another Fantasy Suite, I had sex with Jed, too. He was the one who felt safe to me. He was the first one I told I was falling in love with him.
I went into the room with Jed with pretty much the exact same expectations I’d had with Peter: I was just looking forward to alone time away from the cameras. But it was maybe more complicated with Jed, because we had this deep emotional connection. I loved that he had grown up in the South, and had a bit of that southern charm, but in a modern way, with a more modern perspective on things. Like me!
He’d made a point of admitting to me earlier on that his primary reason for coming on The Bachelorette was not to find love but to promote his career as a musician. He wanted to do anything he could to reach a bigger audience, he said. At first I was a little shocked to hear that he hadn’t come on the show for me, like so many of the other guys had, but then he told me that I had taken him by surprise—and he had fallen for me. Big time. I just thought that was so honest of him. The fact that he had been surprised by his own feelings and was willing to tell me the truth about what he was feeling made me trust him more than ever. And that trust went a long way with me.
We also had some good chemistry going on, and once we started making out, there was no turning back. I’ll be honest here: the sex wasn’t as good as it was with Peter. But my emotional need for connection was more fulfilled. Our night together felt more like what a date night would feel like back home. We had music, and space to dance, and we prayed, and we talked about our relationship with God. Jed and I had spent more time together off camera already, and I already felt more natural and comfortable around him. But in this one night I got to experience what it might feel like to be together in the real world, not just in a tiny bed between stone walls.
That was it for me. I made up my mind right there.
The emotional connection, the familiarity, that sense that we had similar backgrounds, that we could build something together—after being with Jed, I knew that I wasn’t going to sleep with the other two men. I felt pretty confident I knew who I wanted to wind up with. I wanted the guy who would be my best friend, who would make me laugh all the time. Who was safe.
A couple of nights later, I went on my overnight date with Luke, and it quickly turned into a nightmare. I had already seen some red flags. His jealousy, the stories of the fights he was getting into with the other guys in the house, the way he seemed to want to control what I was doing even when he wasn’t around me—none of it felt right. But when it came to values, I thought he and I were the most aligned. He was a Christian, and a “born-again virgin” who talked openly about his faith. That was still up at the top of my list of qualities that I wanted in a future husband, just as it had been when I dated Colton on The Bachelor. And I truly believed what he said: he was there to meet me, and wanted to be with me. That felt right. That felt safe to me.
But that night, after weeks of telling me that he loved me, Luke insisted on knowing if I had slept with any of the other guys. He insisted that I had to tell him, even though I clearly didn’t want to talk about it. (It was written all over my face.) And when I asked him why he was so adamant, he said that if I had slept with any of the other guys on the show, even one of them, then he wanted “to go home”—which is Bachelor-speak for “I want to break up with you.”