God Bless This Mess(54)
So as I stood on a beautiful hillside in Greece, waiting for Jed to arrive, the air felt charged, in an exciting way.
Everyone around me already knew that I was about to hand him the final rose; and if/when he got down on one knee to propose to me, they were pretty sure I was going to say yes.
It was beautiful. The sun was starting to get lower in the sky. There was a herd of goats on the hillside. (Of course, having goats around meant there was goat poop everywhere. The bottoms of my shoes were covered in it by the end of the night! But I digress . . . )
Jed walked up, carrying his guitar, and I was all nervous and giddy. It was all so beautiful, and I had such deep feelings for Jed at this point. My smile was real when I gave him the final rose. He deserved it. We were good together. We could build a life together in Tennessee. I could see that future, at his home, with his dog, listening to him sing and write songs—even though it all felt a bit premature.
I was caught up in the magic and the fantasy of it all when all of a sudden he got down on one knee and pulled out a ring, and I thought . . . No. I can’t. This isn’t what it is supposed to be like.
I said yes anyway.
It’s hard to explain how conflicted I felt. Jed hadn’t done anything wrong. I cared about him. And the engagement itself was dreamy—but it wasn’t necessarily my dream. This wasn’t what I thought it would feel like when I said “Yes” to a man with the intention of spending the rest of my life with him.
Still, that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t listen to my intuition. I set my gut feeling aside, and I said “Yes.”
My smile was not a lie. I wanted to be with Jed. I was excited to have more alone time with him. I thought I loved him. I did. But even as we hugged and kissed each other, as the goats ran out on that beautiful hillside in that gorgeous setting and everything looked so perfect, I kept thinking, This doesn’t feel the way I know love feels.
Well, I thought, maybe it’ll just take time.
There never seemed to be enough time.
So I focused on that: we’d have time now to fall into the love that we’d started on The Bachelorette.
*
I didn’t realize until afterward what the date of our engagement was. I didn’t realize until after that Neil Lane diamond was on my finger that the day we got engaged was the very same day as the anniversary of my aunt’s and cousins’ murder.
It didn’t occur to me until a few weeks later that maybe all those dream catchers I saw weren’t signs that Jed was the one. Maybe those dream catchers were a warning. Maybe they were signs that Jed wasn’t the man for me at all.
*
The show rented a nice house for us to share after our engagement—our first Happy Couple Retreat—but it was a long trip from the resort where I had already been staying, and I was tired. “Let’s just stay here tonight,” I said, and Jed was fine with that. We went to my room, which was beautiful, and we spent the night together, and it was great. We were so happy to be alone with each other again.
Our blissful time off camera wouldn’t last long, though. First thing in the morning I had to get up and go back on camera for ITMs—In the Moment shots, as they’re known in the industry—where I would be asked how much I missed Tyler, and how hard it was to say goodbye, while Jed got to go off and play some golf. It was only a day later. I wasn’t really “missing” Tyler yet. But I wanted to know if he was okay, and when they told me that he was upset, it upset me. I still cared about him. And if he still cared about me, did that mean I’d made a wrong decision? Peter was apparently really upset, too, and I couldn’t let go of the question of what might have happened if I’d had more time to get to know both of them.
That night Jed and I moved to the big rental house, where we had the privacy of a whole second-floor suite to ourselves. The very next day, the show would start airing in the United States. I would fly to New York to do press the morning after that, while Jed would get to fly home.
So much for “time.”
All Jed and I would be allowed to spend together before we had to say goodbye were those three nights. After that, we would be forced to stay apart for the next three months so we wouldn’t spoil the TV show. I couldn’t even put his name in my phone, for fear somebody might see it when he called me and then leak it to the press. (I gave him the name “Ricky Bobby” in my contacts. Yes, that’s Will Farrell’s character from Talladega Nights.) I would only get a chance to see him in secret a handful of times while the show aired, and it would take a whole clandestine operation to pull that off.
Those two nights in the rental house felt really important to me, so we could get our engagement started right—and they didn’t start well at all. On the first night after our engagement, Jed made a comment that caught me off guard.
“I just think it’s really cool that I’m engaged to you,” he said, “and you knew that was gonna happen, and you weren’t intimate with anybody else. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about that.”
“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“You said you weren’t intimate with anybody except me,” he repeated.
I remembered telling him at some point after our overnight date that he was the one; I wasn’t going to be with anybody else. But in the blur of everything, I couldn’t even remember when I said it.