My Reality (21 page)

I mean, honestly, who could really stand to watch the person they’re in love with get engaged to someone else?

But, of course, he couldn’t resist, and he watched both. He got very upset, as I knew he would. I could understand why. It was the same reason that I had been so angry and embarrassed right after we filmed “After the Final Rose.” I knew that watching Jason dump me on TV, with me looking as if he’d completely broken my heart and ended the engagement, would disturb him. Even though I had been absolutely open and honest with Tye about the fact that this wasn’t actually what had happened, and had explained, instead, all of the emotions I felt about the fact that I had been set up by Jason and the producers, it was difficult for him not to take it personally when he saw me crying on the show and saying, “Why can’t I meet anybody? What is wrong with me that I can’t fall in love for real?”

That wasn’t all that Tye had to hear me say on the show, either. The final episode included footage from the home visit, in which my friends talked about how my ex—yes, as in Tye—never wanted to know them and never really came around. That hurt him, too, and it made him mad because he felt judged by my friends who hadn’t met him at that point. It was hard for him to watch me talk about what I had really thought of him and the relationship. It was a truth that I hadn’t ever felt comfortable saying to his face, but apparently I had been able to say it to Jason, and a handful of producers, and a camera that brought it into homes across America.

For some reason, Tye and I weren’t together the night that the finale and “After the Final Rose” aired, and so I watched both by myself, too. I was worried that they might have edited the footage to make me very unlikeable. As I watched, cringing the whole time, texts started pouring in. Right after the finale aired, my phone
blew up
with text messages:

Oh my god!

Congratulations!

Yay! He’s such a great catch!

Then, fifteen minutes later, right after the breakup segment on “After the Final Rose” aired, the text messages continued to come, but they were different this time.

How could he do that?

I’m so sorry!

He didn’t deserve you anyway!

I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. As I watched, I knew that everyone in America was thinking that I was this poor girl who had just gotten dumped on national TV, and that I hadn’t even seen it coming, and was now heartbroken. Meanwhile, I was thinking that
I didn’t want people to believe any of this,
especially
not Tye. I hated the idea that everyone thought I was the victim. As much as I had felt taken advantage of, I didn’t feel like a victim, and I didn’t want to be seen that way. I had come out of everything with so much confidence, and pity was the last thing I wanted.

Right after both shows aired, I tried calling Tye. I listened to his phone ring and then go to voicemail. Every girl knows what this means: He had hit the Ignore button when he saw my name come up on his phone.

Ouch.

I must have called him twenty times in a row, but he just kept hanging up on me. I knew immediately that he had watched the whole show and that he was angry. As I said, I could understand why he was upset. How many men out there could watch their girlfriend fall in love on TV, get engaged to another man, and still be sane? If I had been in his situation, I don’t know if I could have watched him saying things to another girl that he had never said to me before, and essentially falling in love with someone else right in front of my eyes. Even though I told him it wasn’t real, that didn’t make it any easier for him to see.

Meanwhile, nobody knew that he and I were back together, and so his coworkers and friends had been giving him a hard time. They couldn’t believe that, other than a little bit of the first episode that he accidentally saw at the gym, he hadn’t watched any of the show. They weren’t above rubbing it in his face that he’d apparently lost me to this dude on a dating show. Some of them told him that he wouldn’t have wanted to be with me anyway if he had seen what I was doing on the show. After the finale, he was going to face a whole lot more fallout. So I got why he was upset, but I didn’t think he had a right to be
that
upset. I mean, I was sitting at home, by myself,
humiliated at how I had looked on the show, and my boyfriend was beyond talking to me, he was so upset.

Great. Here we go again.
Just when it had felt like all of the puzzle pieces in my life were finally settling into place, something had to come and shake it all up again! I was devastated. Tye and I had survived two months of really hard stuff, while keeping our new relationship a secret the whole time. I gave Tye a lot of credit; it was definitely a hard time for us to get through. But I really thought we had made it. Only maybe we hadn’t. Maybe we had gotten this far only to have the show ruin our new start.

To add extra pressure to the situation, I was leaving in two days to be a guest on
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
. When I couldn’t get ahold of Tye, I started to panic.

We should at least talk about this!

The next time I called him, and still didn’t get through, I left a message:

“I don’t want to leave like this because I don’t know how we are. I’m going tomorrow, and I want to be able to talk about you on
Ellen
. But if things are not okay between us, you need to tell me, because I just went on TV and professed my feelings for one relationship that wasn’t true. I’m not about to go do it again, if I’m going to come home and you’re going to say it didn’t work out between us.”

For twenty minutes, I blew up his phone, calling, hanging up, calling, hanging up. You would have thought I’d have learned my lesson about acting like a crazy stalker, but the thought of losing Tye over this was beyond what I could handle. When I still couldn’t reach him, I started to cry. I knew the poo was about to hit the fan, as I like to say. I couldn’t imagine what everyone’s reaction to my secret TV adventure would be. None of my coworkers had known. None of the cheerleaders had known. As I was trying to deal with
all of this, people started calling me and texting me, but all I wanted was to talk to the one person who didn’t want to talk to me: Tye.

As I later learned, I wasn’t the only one trying to get ahold of Tye that night. The show had aired nationwide, and so everybody was trying to reach him, including his friends, his brother, and his sister. But he wasn’t talking to anybody. Finally, his dad called him, and I’ve always thanked him for what he said to Tye.

“What’s going on?” he asked Tye. “Are you okay?”

“No, Dad, I’m not,” Tye said.

“Why don’t you quit feeling sorry for yourself and for once think about how she feels, and call her and apologize?” Tye’s dad said.

Tye’s dad was the one person who could always get through to him. The one person who could make him reevaluate a situation. And this time it worked.

The next time I called Tye, he answered. I was so scared about what he was going to say.

“I just need time to get over it,” he said. “That stuff was not easy to see or hear. Just give me some time. But I do love you, and I’m not going anywhere.”

I’ve had so many happy moments during my relatively short but incredibly convoluted relationship with Tye. But that was definitely one of the happiest.
Phew! Crisis averted!

Knowing that our relationship was going to survive this, I became quite sure that there was nothing we couldn’t face in the future. I mean, this has got to be one of the hardest things a couple can go through, right? Or at least the most awkward.

Once I knew that Tye and I were okay, I started thinking more and more about everyone else who had watched the show. I was honestly scared to find out what the public reaction was to
The Bachelor
, and to me. I knew the whole backstory, and so I couldn’t
watch the finale or “ATFR” as an impartial viewer. But people who didn’t know everything that had happened probably had a very different reaction. Were people mad at me? Did they hate me? Did I look like a crazy woman on that stage? I had no idea.

While the show was airing, I had sometimes checked out online message boards. I have to admit that I thought it was kind of cool that people were talking about little old me. But now I figured they would be down on me or think I was stupid for making the decisions I had made.

During the time between when ATFR aired on Monday and when I left for Los Angeles to tape
Ellen
on Wednesday, I had purposely avoided all message boards, magazines, and entertainment shows. I had no idea what would happen on
Ellen
. Would she grill me? Would she think I had made a stupid mistake? I was nervous when I thought about what was to come. But at least I was excited to be able to talk about Tye and brag about my relationship with him.

My first visit to
Ellen
was mind blowing. I had never been on a television set before. And I had my own dressing room with my name on the door! I got my hair and makeup done by the artists in the studio. It was pretty cool.

But I was still anxious about what was going to happen. I was shaking when I walked out onto the stage. And then, the crowd
erupted
into applause and chants as I was introduced. I got a huge standing ovation.
What in the world?!

As I took in the audience’s response, I whispered to Ellen that I was nervous.

“Don’t be nervous,” she said. “Everybody’s a friend here.”

And she could not have been more right. The audience went nuts when they saw me. The only problem was that they had just seen me get dumped two days before. Meanwhile, on the day that
I appeared on
Ellen
, I had already had those three months since taping ended to put
The Bachelor
behind me and get back on track with my new relationship. So I had pictures of Tye with me, and I was talking about this great new boyfriend I had, and I think it was hard for people to grasp this. Without knowing all of the backstory, they seemed to think that, because I was in a new relationship, I must not have been that heartbroken about Jason, or that Jason and I had just made up our whole relationship for TV. But the overall reaction to my appearance was very positive, and that was such a huge relief after all of those months when I had worried about how bad it would be when the show aired.

The next day, which was a Thursday, I flew back home and went back to work. I did my best to hide out in my cubicle and ignore everyone who wanted to talk about
The Bachelor
that day. But the show wouldn’t just go away. My episode had been the most watched
Bachelor
episode EVER, and the production company that made
The Bachelor
approached me that week about being their next Bachelorette. They really wanted me to do it, but the idea could not have been further from my mind. I had no interest in going back to television (note the irony . . . I know).

“No,” I said. “I’m not interested.”

They kept raising the dollar amount, and raising the dollar amount, and raising the dollar amount. Little did they know, money is not the way into my heart.

“You’re not listening to me,” I said. “It’s not about the money.”

They kept trying to convince me.

“I don’t trust you anymore,” I told one of the producers who called. “I really don’t. I came into this in a very vulnerable state, and I feel like I got used for TV. I don’t blame you, but what would stop you from using my emotions again to get a good episode?”

As I’ve said, outside the Bubble, I understood they had just been doing their jobs, and I didn’t blame them. But there was no way I was going to put myself back in the Bubble again. If I did, I would have no one to blame but myself for any unhappiness that came from the experience. And I knew there would be abundant unhappiness, especially compared to what I now had with Tye.

They would not give up.

“As the Bachelorette, we would have your back,” they said. “You’d be fine.” That meant very little to me. I had just seen them throw their Bachelor, Jason, under the bus. The “After the Final Rose” episode had done nothing to make him look like a hero, or even very likeable. So I had no reason to think they would do anything different for me.

I was finally happy. I was with the love of my life. Things were just starting to feel normal again, and I didn’t want to tempt fate. The money was not enticing enough to take me away from Tye and make me go through the whole process again. But, honestly, even if I hadn’t been with Tye, I don’t think I would have done it. The whole experience was so emotionally draining and embarrassing that I couldn’t imagine putting myself through anything like it again. I do know that it meant a lot to Tye that I chose not to do
The Bachelorette.
He knew I loved him, but turning down an opportunity like
The Bachelorette
proved to him just how serious I was about us. At the same time, the producers also approached Jillian, another
Bachelor
contestant, about being on
The Bachelorette.
She and I had remained good friends after the show, and so we talked about our decisions.

“I’m not doing it at all,” I said. “I know it’s a totally different situation for you, but after what I’ve gone through, not a chance.”

Jillian’s experience on
The Bachelor
had differed greatly from mine, and so I could understand why she wanted to be the
Bachelorette, and I was happy that she got the opportunity to do it. None of us girls was supposed to be in contact with each other until after
The Bachelor
aired, and we hadn’t really, except for the time I got word that Molly and Jason had been talking behind my back. It was such a relief to have the girls back in my life now. Not only had I missed Jillian and Naomi after we left the show, but because of how close we had become, they understood what I had been through better than anyone else, because they had been right there with me. While I could talk to Reagan and Stefani about my experience, they didn’t really get how I had fallen for Jason so fast and so hard. But, just like me, Naomi and Jill had been three weeks in and fast in love on the show. It was easier to talk to them about the whole thing because I didn’t have to try to explain how I got so wrapped up in it. They understood the process we went through, and the behind-the-scenes reality, and so they were definitely the easiest people for me to talk to throughout that time.