God Bless This Mess(53)

I had started to soften slowly over the course of our time on the show, but things really had started to change for me when I met his family the week before this. I remember feeling like they were my people. We just clicked. And then my family met him and loved him, too. And that made me wonder if maybe I had been falling in love with him all along.

What I needed from the Fantasy Suite date was to get to know him—to see if it was safe for me to fall for him. And that is exactly what we did. We connected that night like two people might at the beginning of a long romance. We bonded like close friends do, just talking and talking for hours. We talked about family, and about all sorts of things that were so personal that we didn’t want to share them with each other on camera.

After that night together, when we were completely open with each other and we made out like crazy—and nothing more—I woke up thinking, I cannot lose him.

It was all so confusing. I needed more time with him.

According to the rules of the show, I had to send someone home. I had already brought four people to the Fantasy Suite dates, when past Bachelorettes had only brought three. I had to make up my mind.

How could I send Peter home? We’d had sex! We had such a wonderful night together. Sending him home would shock him, and maybe break his heart. That was confusing to me, too.

Of these three men who I had just started to develop genuine feelings for, Jed was the only one who didn’t feel so confusing to me. Our relationship had at least progressed on somewhat of a natural timeline. And at that point, just that little bit of extra familiarity felt safer than anything else.





Chapter 17


Losing Trust


I’ve spent a lot of time looking back on this crazy-fast period of my life, and trying to make sense of the decisions I made—including the bad ones. And I think it all comes down to this: because I had no internal peace, I was looking for external signs to help me make my decisions. At that point, I had zero internal confidence in my ability to decide what was right or wrong, and after the Fantasy Suite date nights, I had only five days to decide which guy I wanted to potentially marry. I had already disregarded so many of my gut feelings just to get through the making of the show that I was physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted.

So I looked outside myself for signs from God, from the universe, from other people’s opinions, from anything I could get. And whenever I was with Jed, I saw signs.

For example, every time I was on a date with Jed, I saw dream catchers. Even in the Netherlands, which to me seemed like the last place a person might see a dream catcher on some random wall. Dream catchers always made me feel safe, and for a girl who was looking for markers from God, that seemed like a pretty clear sign. It seemed like maybe my aunt and cousins were trying to let me know that they knew the person I was supposed to be with.

So even though things were complicated, the signs I saw made me feel like my heart was being led to Jed. And I ignored the mixed emotions in my gut saying maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have enough information to make the decision.

I had to send someone home the morning after I woke up with Tyler, and I decided it had to be Peter. It felt brutal sending him home. Like we’d just started really falling for each other, and then bam, it was over. He had no idea it was coming. None! I felt terrible. I’m not someone who spends a night with a guy, gets so intimate with him, and then tosses him to the curb a few days later. That wasn’t me. Or at least that’s not who I wanted to be. I had just changed my mind about it a few hours before I let him go, so I wasn’t even sure about it myself. He was upset. I was upset.

The pressure was like nothing I’d ever felt before, and I didn’t feel like I knew any of these guys well enough to fully make up my mind.

You know what it felt like? It felt like MASH, the fortune-telling game that my friends and I used to play in the after-school pickup line. You can look up a detailed description of this game on YouTube, but MASH stands for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House, and you write down options and then randomly connect all these things in your imaginary future life, like the city you’re going to live in, the boys you have crushes on, the number of kids you’re going to have. And then, depending on the list and the way the game plays out, the result predicts your life: “You’re gonna live in a shack with your second crush, Bobby, and have five kids, and you’re going to drive a minivan!”

In this case, the theoretical game eliminated the choices until I got down to, “Well, I guess it’s Jed!”

I took ownership over my decision. It wasn’t decided by chance or by anyone else. But my mom later said I was making decisions like a little kid might: “Oh, I’ll take that one because his sister Lily has the same birthday as Patrick! And he wrote me four songs, and he broke a string on his guitar and made me a cute bracelet out of it!” All of those things are true, by the way, but these aren’t reasons to get engaged to somebody. They all seem kind of silly, looking back on it now.

But then? All I saw were the signs I needed.

*

I sent Tyler home about forty minutes before Jed was scheduled to arrive.

I hated it. We had all this potential that hadn’t been fully explored yet, but there just wasn’t time.

According to the signs and the experiences I’d had over those crazy eight weeks, Jed was the guy who I thought could give me a life I wanted.