In a revelation that should shock absolutely no one considering what we now know about Jed Wyatt, Hannah Brown’s engagement on The Bachelorette was messy even before she learned about Wyatt’s girlfriend. Once the cameras stopped rolling, the couple was forced to confront reality after reality television, and - not surprisingly - it wasn’t the same.
It’s often the case for the lead on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette to have a pretty good sense of who they want to see themselves engaged to at the end of the show before the cast is whittled down to the final two. Their mind isn’t always made up until the last day, and there’s usually at least one clear front-runner. This past season, that guy - especially once the Luke P. show ended - was Wyatt. Brown’s internal insistence on wanting it to be Wyatt at the end fogged her perspective on relationships with Tyler Cameron and Peter Weber, both of which looked like they had more potential. As the post-filming partnership with Wyatt started to unravel, what was clear to the audience soon became evident to Brown.
In an interview with People, Brown detailed the challenges she faced during her short engagement to Wyatt. She waited three days to call her parents because she knew they weren’t fans of the man she chose. Brown thought her family was only worried about Wyatt’s unstable financial situation as a musician, but she now thinks they had already heard rumors about her fiancé’s ex-girlfriend at that time. Two days after the proposal, Wyatt told Brown about his ex, but didn’t divulge crucial information. Even though Brown believed Wyatt’s story that his former relationship was in the past when he first mentioned it, she still wasn’t happy, saying, “I would have liked to have known about it before. It definitely bothered me.”
Brown sought comfort from Wyatt in her honesty about still trying to get over runner-up Cameron, but instead she was met with insecurity. She said, “I didn’t validate him enough. That put a strain on our relationship. He wasn’t the man that I got engaged to.” After hearing news of Wyatt’s ex, Brown interrogated him on the details of his deception. He lied to her, which led to a further round of questioning once the People interview with Wyatt’s ex Haley Stevens was published. Brown said, “It was really embarrassing to have to send an article to my fiancé and circle parts and ask if they were true. It was rough.” She admitted she doesn’t believe she would have ended things with Wyatt so soon had he been truthful to her.
The highly-publicized breakup and complementary piling on Wyatt on social media underscores an issue with the show’s structure: the couples who choose to get engaged don’t really know each other well enough to commit to a marriage. Even when former leads of The Bachelorette have remained with the man they picked - as has been the case with the three women who preceded Brown - the engagement tends to last more than a year, if not more, because there’s still so much to learn about one another before tying the knot. In this instance, Brown fell in love with Wyatt, the television character, the version of himself he chose to present. The irony is when he and Brown went into hiding before the airing of the season, that’s when Wyatt learned could no longer hide from his past.
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Source: People
