Season 22 Bachelor Arie Luyendyk, Jr. is spilling some tea about how incredibly difficult it is to actually find love on the show, calling it a grueling “process.” Arie, 38, and wife Lauren Burnham, 28, appeared on the podcast Couple Things with Shawn Johnson and Andrew East on June 10, where they agreed that finding your soul mate after just 10 weeks of dating multiple women is “nuts.” Arie said it is why so many couples from the show “don’t make it,” when it comes to actually tying the knot. You can check out what he had to say starting at the 7:44 mark in the below audio.
“It’s such a difficult — I hate to call it process — but it is a difficult show. And that’s probably why you find that a lot of people don’t make it, is because it’s just so taxing emotionally,” Arie dished. “It’s just, like, it’s not natural to have two people that you [have], at the end, and then have to break up with one person and get engaged to another person an hour later. It’s just so weird. It’s, like, no wonder it barely works. I’m happy, but….”
Arie ended up not picking Lauren to be his bride because he didn’t realize she had feelings for him until it was too late. “I didn’t think she was that into me the whole beginning of the show, so I kind of let other relationships develop and then it got toward the end and I was like ‘Oh dang! She actually really likes me,’” he explained. “And then it was just like, our relationship bloomed so late in that whole Bachelor world that, that’s why the ending got a little mixed up.”
When he says “mixed up,” Arie means he picked the wrong future Mrs. Luyendyk Jr. Lauren ended up as his runner-up, and instead Arie chose with his head over his heart and selected Becca Kufrin, 30, as his future bride. He realized about a month after filming wrapped that he’d made a mistake. He broke up with a blind-sided Becca as cameras rolled, for what turned into a dramatic two-night Bachelor TV event. It was so raw and painful, but he was then free to successfully pursue Lauren.
It worked well in the end, despite a lot of tears at the time. Arie and Lauren tied the knot on January 12, 2019, and welcomed their first child, daughter Alessi four months later in May 2019. So real relationships do come out of The Bachelor’s “difficult process.” Becca went on to get her own chance at love as the season 14 Bachelorette, eventually getting engaged to contestant Garrett Yrigoyen.
Lauren added that “I feel like it takes time to build trust too, so you pick whatever feels the most comfortable and you can put the most faith in at the end. It’s so hard to do that in such a short amount of time.” Ari explained, “It’s ten weeks, which feels like a lot longer than it is. But it’s still ten weeks so it’s kind of nuts to think about.” Yep, most single folks would agree finding their soulmate in two and a half months while dating other people is pretty “nuts.”