For the Right Reasons (21 page)

What is going on?
I wondered. I wasn’t prepared for the celebrity that came along with the show.
Celebrity
isn’t the right word, because I certainly am not one. To me, a celebrity is someone like Brad Pitt (a guy with immense acting ability), Kevin Durant (a guy with dazzling athletic skill), or John Mayer (a guy with a smooth voice). Yet, every Monday, people loved live-tweeting
The Bachelorette—
even honest-to-goodness celebrities tweeted about my fate. It sucked me in.
Whoa, this celebrity knows my name. What?

With each passing episode, I started getting more and more recognition.

“Hey, that’s Sean from
The Bachelorette
,” I began to hear in hushed tones when I was at a restaurant or the post office. It was all new, fascinating, and bizarre. I had no idea what I was stepping into.

It was just a taste of what was to come.

Halfway through
The Bachelorette
season, I got a call from one of
The Bachelor
’s executive producers, Travis Wunderli, who’s married to Mary Kate, the producer assigned to Emily.

“Did you see someone on the Internet has already spoiled the fact that Roberto is the next
Bachelor
?”

“I saw someone wrote on a blog that Roberto’s contracts were already signed,” I said.

“Well, those are just rumors,” said Travis. “What do you think about being
The Bachelor
?”

“Me?”

“Of course you!”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me think about it. Give me a few days.”

I didn’t want to make a hasty decision, but I was definitely intrigued. Frequently, people leave the show saying, “It’s contrived. You can’t fall in love on a television show. It’s all fake. It’s staged.”

While I understand their sentiment, I’d pushed my chips into the center of the table. I was all in.

Can you fall in love on a reality TV show?

I did. And so did Arie and Jef.

Even though it seemed incredibly unlikely that the producers of
The Bachelor
could somehow put my future wife into the mix of potential mates, I still knew the possibility of love existed.

“Travis just asked me to be the next
Bachelor
, and I don’t know yet,” I told my parents.

To be honest, I felt bad for putting Mom and Dad through this wild-goose chase. When Shay and Andrew originally signed me up to go on the show, I never once considered I’d end up with a broken heart. My family had been supportive, kind, and encouraging, even through the worst moments.

But I assumed they looked back at the show as a generally negative experience. I’d tried to hold the snake by the tail and I’d gotten bitten. Because of what I’d put them through, I was hesitant even to bring it up. I valued their advice, though, so I braced myself for their reactions.

“You’d be crazy not to do it,” my dad said.

“Aren’t you skeptical?” I asked. “After the way everything unfolded?”

“This door has been opened for you, son,” my dad said. “Maybe you should walk through it.”

Even my mom—the original
Bachelorette
skeptic—was onboard. “You have to do it,” she said.

It seemed like an amazing opportunity, and I was honored that the producers would even consider me. I called Travis back at the end of the week.

“I’ll do it.”

This was yet another secret I had to keep while watching the show with my friends. With each passing week, things intensified on the show, and I was dreading the episode in which I snuck out of our hotel in Prague and secretly went looking for Emily after her date with John Wolfner. He was one of my closest friends on the show. I felt guilty I sabotaged his one-on-one date with Emily with an impromptu date of my own. The week our secret excursion was going to be broadcast on television, I called him.

“Wolf, don’t be mad at me, but I have something to tell you,” I said before explaining the whole story.

“I don’t care,” Wolf said in his typical easygoing way. “I didn’t like her anyway!”

This was no surprise. Throughout the show, it was obvious who was falling for Emily and who wasn’t. It wasn’t that some guys were inauthentic in their interactions with her. It was just that some people connected and others didn’t. Just like in real life.

As we watched that episode later that night, my friends were supportive, but they also gave me a hard time.

“You’re running through the streets of Prague screaming her name?” Stephanie asked.

“Did you think the producers didn’t know where she was?” Murrey asked.

Anytime I did or said something weird on the show, my friends quickly pointed it out and laughed. Even worse, everyone groaned when they saw me kissing Emily on-screen. There is nothing more peculiar than seeing yourself kiss another person—especially in the close-up way
The Bachelorette
films it. I knew my friends’ teasing came from a place of deep love, so I laughed along with them. As the weeks progressed, my relationship with
Emily got more serious on the screen, even as the stranglehold of sadness loosened its grip on my heart.

When the episode aired during which I got the boot, the room was stone silent.

“Are you okay?” one asked, giving me a hug. My phone lit up with concerned texts and calls. All my friends wanted to express kindness to me, which I so appreciated. What most people failed to understand was that my heart had been broken months prior to airing. By the time she sent me home on television, I’d finally gotten over Emily.

In fact, after seeing how everything ended up for her, I was sort of relieved she’d sent me home. Though I think I could’ve made her happy as a husband, I saw that she was attracted to a very different type of guy. It was all for the best, and I was thrilled when I finally realized that.

My newfound peace of mind didn’t stop me from enjoying all the love my friends and supporters sent my way. It felt good to be loved on.

After the season was over, I saw that Emily had ended up with Jef—an all-around great guy. Something about seeing them get engaged and the show wrapping up gave me a gigantic sense of relief. I’d heard so many horror stories about how producers in reality TV have such power over how people are portrayed. By taking clips out of context and using selective quotes, they could make a perfectly reasonable person look like a lunatic. Perhaps that’s true on some reality TV shows, but I found that I was portrayed on the show exactly how I am in real life. In general, people who end up as reality TV villains usually are jerks in real life. The ones who seem like nice folks usually are. My theory is that the camera doesn’t really lie—at least, not on
The Bachelorette
. Because they film for many consecutive weeks, what you see is usually what you get because it’s hard to maintain a fake personality for that long.

I flew to Los Angeles to meet the producers of
The Bachelor
and to solidify my standing as the next Bachelor. Also, there were other fun activities I got to participate in as a member of the cast of
The Bachelorette
.

For example, Cole Hamels—a pitcher for the Phillies and apparently a
Bachelorette
fan—invited some of us to his event for the Hamels Foundation, a charity supporting Philadelphia inner-city schools and a school in Malawi.

When I arrived at the event, I grabbed a drink and looked around the room to see if I could find any other
Bachelorette
alumni. That’s when I saw her.

Brooke.

Now married to a Phillies baseball player, we somehow ended up at the same party on the other side of the country. There were a lot of people at this charity event, and I wondered if I should pretend I hadn’t seen her. As I was standing there gawking, I caught her eye. She looked momentarily surprised but smiled back. It was going to be weird to say hello to her and her new husband, but I figured it would’ve been weirder not to.

“Brooke?” I said, walking up to them. She looked radiant.

“Hey, how you doing?” I introduced myself to her husband, who was well aware of our previous relationship. “Great to see you.”

“How are the dogs?” she asked.

As we exchanged awkward chitchat, I wasn’t sure if I’d made the right decision. After a few minutes of stunted conversation, I excused myself.

As I walked away from them, I realized how much I missed her. I was thrilled she was happily married, but seeing her reminded me that she’d moved on and our friendship was—necessarily—over. An hour or so later, I ran into her again, but this time she was alone.

“I watched the show,” she said. “When you talked about us, you didn’t really tell the whole story.”

“I know,” I said. On television, I explained I’d had a three-year relationship with someone who simply wasn’t the one for me. I’d left out the part about me going back to Brooke and asking her to take me back. “I had to paint a picture without going into exhausting detail about any former relationships.”

Her face fell a bit.

“I’m sorry,” I said with a pang in my stomach.

Later, I saw Brooke and her husband from afar at a church in Dallas. I watched the two of them with their hands in the air, worshipping together, and it brought me so much peace. I left church with a huge smile on my face, a strong sense of satisfaction, and not a trace of jealousy.

I was so happy she ended up with such a great guy and an amazing marriage.

I wondered if I’d ever find that for myself.

ten

THE DRIVER’S SEAT

“God, lead me. You’re in control of this,” I prayed while waiting for the women to arrive for my season of
The Bachelor
. (I had expected twenty-five women, but later learned there would be an extra woman that season, making a total of twenty-six.) The mansion was on Canaan Road in Agora Hills, just north of Los Angeles and east of Malibu. Tucked in the hills among other beautiful mansions and scenic wineries, the girls’ house was about a mile down the road from the amazing multimillion-dollar home at which I’d be staying. The home was set on a cliff, and almost every wall was floor-to-ceiling windows. It had a home gym and an awesome pool.

“I could get used to this,” I told Mary Kate. I’d arrived a week earlier to start shooting for the show and teamed back up with the army of producers. It was a little strange to see Mary Kate because of her friendship with Emily during
The Bachelorette
.

“So, how is Emily?” I asked her between takes while we filmed the B-roll footage. They filmed me in a Jeep driving down the Pacific Coast Highway, working out, jogging, and generally getting ready for the girls to arrive.

“Well, she got your message,” she said. I looked at Mary Kate to make sure I’d heard her correctly. Until that moment, I doubted whether I’d called the right number after I’d just arrived back in Dallas. Because I promised myself not to call twice, I wasn’t sure whether Emily knew
I’d tried to reach her. “Emily told me you called, and she wrestled with whether to call you back.”

“She didn’t,” I said, perhaps too abruptly. “I wouldn’t have called her had I known she was engaged to Jef.”