Reality TV brought Ben Higgins and Lauren Bushnell together, and it split them apart.
This week, Higgins appeared on the “Click Bait With Bachelor Nation” podcast and opened up about the end of his relationship with Bushnell after getting engaged on the “Bachelor” in 2016.
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“I don’t think there was a characteristic that was wrong, necessarily, but the timing of our life, right?” Higgins said. “I was 26, she was 25, we had just walked into this whole new world together. We were living in Denver, where she knew nobody, and then life was pulling us in a thousand different directions.”
The two announced the end of their relationship in 2017 after starring on the post-“Bachelor” series “Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After?”
“If anything, we walked into it still getting to know each other, so we weren’t teammates,” Higgins explained. “It just ended up pulling us apart, but I think it pulled us apart for the right reasons. Now I’m happily engaged, she’s very happily married and has a kid on the way. Now I look back on it and go, Of course it didn’t work out. We weren’t each other’s best fits. But I also can look back on it and learn a lot, too.”
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Higgins has since moved on, meeting Jessica Clarke on social media and getting engaged in March 2020.
“She walked up to the front steps, and my driveways a little long,” he said, remembering the first time they met in person. “She had her bags in her hand, and I just walked out, and I just gave her a kiss. Not just a peck—I laid it on her. And she was just kind of like, Whoa!”
