For the Right Reasons (28 page)

I could see myself saying good-bye to Des, but I was not ready to say good-bye to Catherine.

“Catherine,” I said. “Will you accept this rose?”

Des was devastated.

“I know you have every quality that I’m looking for in a wife,” I told Des as I was walking her to the vehicle.

I wasn’t ready to see her go, but I knew if I kept her I’d have to send someone else home in her place. I wasn’t prepared to do that. It was an excruciating, confusing, and emotional night.

“I really think you’re making a mistake,” she cried. “I really do.”

As I watched her drive off, I was starting to believe her.

thirteen

WARNING SIGNALS

It was going to be a tough week.

With three women left, I knew whoever was sent home next was going to be as devastated as I was during Emily’s season when I was rejected so close to the finish line. There’s something that happens after the hometown dates—everything gets more emotional and challenging. Most people watching from home assumed I had a secret favorite, a front-runner about whom I harbored marital hopes. Even I figured if I was just a week away from proposing to someone, surely I’d know who’d be receiving the ring.

And my heart.

Surely the indecision, people asked me, was just to keep the show interesting—to make people watch until the end. But it was real. Somehow, the final three bachelorettes were all on a level playing field as we went into the week that would result in the final rose ceremony.

I smiled when I saw AshLee, taken aback by how much I’d missed her over the past ten days since Houston. If I wrote down everything I wanted in a woman, AshLee would have met all of the requirements. Well, almost all of them. At the top of my list was faith. I needed someone who would challenge me in my spiritual walk. AshLee professed Christianity, was from an amazingly loving family, and seemed to be ready to settle down. The only thing she lacked was a sense of fun. It bothered me that I didn’t laugh
as much with AshLee as I did with Lindsay and Catherine, but her other qualities made her intensity easy to overlook.

Our date—as always—was amazing. We got on a boat and sailed between Thailand’s huge rock formations—maybe two hundred feet tall—that jutted out of the water. Eventually, we got to a gigantic rock formation with a dark cave. The producers gave us a life raft with a camera mounted on it.

“Swim into that black hole and find your way to the light,” Mary Kate told me. “Just hold on to this while you swim so we can film it.”

I swam with that raft out in front of me while AshLee was on my back. While it may have looked romantic when it aired, I struggled so hard to stay above water in that pitch-black cave. I couldn’t find my way around. Finally, well after I wanted to give up, the producers started helping me out a bit. “This way,” they would tell me. “Now go here.” When we finally got out of the terrible darkness, we emerged into the middle of a rock formation where the rocks encircled our own private beach. I’d never seen anything like it.

Could I marry this woman?
I asked myself throughout the date.

As I looked into her eyes, the answer was always the same.

Yes.

We finished the date with dinner by the ocean in the most picturesque setting imaginable. Something, however, loomed over us.

“Look what I have,” I said as I picked up the envelope the producers had left us.

“Sean and AshLee, welcome to the magical country of Thailand,” she read after opening the envelope. “Should you choose to forego your personal rooms, please use this key to enjoy your time in the fantasy suite.”

I learned a great deal from how Emily had handled the fantasy suite issue, and I wanted to do things differently. The bottom line was that I wasn’t going to have sex with any of the remaining three women that week. I’d already lived my life in a selfish, self-gratifying way. Now that I’d recommitted my life to Christ, I was going to live by the sexual standards I knew were right. Plus, why would any woman have sex with a guy who was also presumably going to hook up with two others the very same week? There’s no way I was going to put women I cared about in that position.

However, I had only ten weeks to find a wife, so every second counted. I decided not to make a big deal out of saying no to the fantasy suite. To do that felt like moral posturing. Instead, I wanted to use that night, alone, without any distractions, to really connect with the women. Plus, I wanted to know how they’d act when the cameras weren’t rolling.

“Before you tell me what you think,” I said after AshLee read the card, “it’s important for you to know my intentions. I want to use this time to be alone, no distractions, just you and me, so we can talk.”

When she heard the word
talk
, she smiled in relief.

“Obviously, I agree the time is important. I worry this will come across that I’m crossing a boundary. I know where you stand, and you know where I stand. I completely trust you.”

It was obvious she and I shared the same outlook on the overnight dates. We went to the fantasy suite and spent the rest of the evening talking about the future. Though I could envision my life with AshLee, I recall her saying something that caught me off guard when we were—finally—alone.

“I have an idea!” I remember her saying.

“Lay it on me.”

“After we get engaged, we should do a newlywed show,” she said.

“
Another
show?” I asked.

“Yeah, that way it’ll take pressure off of us.”

“You think a reality show would take pressure
off
of us?” I laughed.
Surely, she’s joking
, I thought. But she wasn’t joking.

Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, we met on a reality TV show, and we were having the conversation in the context of a reality TV show. However, it caused a red flag to go up in my heart. One of the biggest fears I had was that I’d fall for someone who was addicted to fame. Usually you can spot them from day one. They show up with a guitar and a song they wrote “just for you.” It’s obvious they’re trying to parlay the notoriety of the show into some longer-lasting fame. I thought I’d already sent all those women home. But during this off-camera conversation, I wondered if maybe I had let one of them slip through.

As a comparison, Lindsay also accepted my talk-through-the-night
invitation to the fantasy suite. While we were there, the talk invariably went to hypothetical wedding scenarios.

“If this works out,” I asked, “would you want to have a televised wedding?”

“Nope,” she said emphatically. “I don’t want to be on camera anymore. My parents have property in Nevada with a barn on it. I want to get married in that barn away from everybody. Just you and me and the people we love.”

I really appreciated her authenticity.

When I met Catherine on the beach for our date, I realized I’d missed her so much. Although I’d almost sent her home after the hometown dates, I found myself thinking so much about her. Every week, Mary Kate asked me the same question: “Who are you most looking forward to seeing?” When she asked me this week, I was surprised to find myself thinking of Catherine.

Our date consisted of sailing on a junk boat, which is an ancient Chinese sailing vessel still used today. Ours was flat bottomed, lined with teak, with big red sails. As the overcast day turned sunny, we kicked back and talked on the ship’s deck. There was a lot to talk about. I left the hometown date wondering if we had the same life goals and if we wanted to live our lives the same way. Of the three remaining girls, Catherine’s life seemed the most different from mine. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but I needed to know if she was serious about this whole thing.

“Do you think you could live in Dallas?” I asked. “The reason I ask is because in this environment, it’s so easy to get swept away. We’re having so much fun now.”

She looked at me with her big, brown eyes. I wanted to believe all would be well, but I needed to get answers. “When all the cameras go away, it’s just going to be you and me. Can we make it work?”

She told me that she hadn’t been ready to settle down in the past, but she was now.

“What makes it different?” I asked.

“It’s you,” she said simply. “I’m myself around you . . . and you aren’t freaked out about it.”

Her response was interesting. When I became the Bachelor, that was my main goal: to be real and to encourage the girls to be real. Catherine had obviously taken that to heart. It made me feel more relaxed around her and more authentic. I felt I got her and she got me. And I could really see her as a potential wife.

Later, in my ITM interview, I told Mary Kate, “Catherine put my mind at ease about being ready to settle down and maybe have a family.”

After swimming and snorkeling, we got back on the boat to head to the hotel and prepare for the evening portion of the date. The sky had grown ominous again, and rain began to fall. Off in the distance, lightning danced in the sky. There, on the boat in the rain, Catherine and I shared the most romantic kiss.

When we went to dinner, the fantasy suite card loomed heavily in the background. Catherine was the first to address the elephant in the room. Before going on the show, she explained, she never thought she’d participate in the overnight dates. “I also didn’t even think I’d fall for you.” As the time went on, she said, she had developed feelings for me but she still wanted to be considered a lady.

I loved that she said that.

“I realize now the overnight dates are a way to spend time with you,” she explained.

“Hopefully, you understand my intentions,” I said before offering her the key.

It was wonderful to be able to talk to her that night in the overnight suite. She opened up and became really vulnerable, explaining that she’d been made fun of as a kid. She’d been called chubby, for example. “Not in a mean way,” she said. “They thought I could handle the teasing and I couldn’t.”

I couldn’t believe such an attractive person would sit there telling me she was nervous to be in a swimsuit. So I assured her by stating the obvious: “You’re smoking hot.”

Our time in the fantasy suite allowed us to talk—for the first and only time—without being mic’ed up. It was an important point in our relationship, and I left the date with many fewer questions than I had going into it.

That week at the rose ceremony, I knew what I had to do. It was raining that day, which set an appropriately depressing mood. We were supposed to have the rose ceremony on the beach, but the weather wasn’t going to cooperate. The crew had prepared the beachside set all week, so they hoped the dark clouds would roll away in time. As the rain continued to pour, the producers decided to move it into the hotel’s lobby. In about an hour the show’s art and lighting departments created a set for the ceremony that looked amazing.

I walked out to the ladies, who looked particularly nervous. As always, I had to deliver a speech. In the beginning of the season, Mary Kate helped me organize my thoughts into bullet points. The first was always something like, “I had a wonderful week getting to know you better,” the second was usually about something that happened during the week, and so forth.

“The speeches will always end abruptly,” she said. “There’s not going to be a smooth transition from your speech to the ceremony, but it comes off okay on camera.” She was right. Week after week, I made my well-crafted speech, but there was no good transition to, “Okay, now it’s time for one of you to leave.”

By the middle of the season, I no longer needed help organizing my thoughts for my speeches. Eventually, I ad-libbed them. Though all of my speeches were absolutely from the heart, my speech in Thailand—during the last rose ceremony—was the most agonizing.

“I had the most amazing week this week,” I said.
Bullet point number one? Check
. “I feel so blessed to be here in Thailand and see one of the most beautiful parts of the world with three of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met. This week brings painful memories for me. This was the week Emily sent me home. I was blindsided. I didn’t see it coming. My worst fear is that the same is going to happen today. It kills me inside to know I might break your heart. I also hope you realize how much you mean to me, and how hard it was to make this decision.”

The producers were standing out of sight of the cameras, nodding. They looked genuinely moved at the heartfelt speech. Catherine looked terrified, as she did in every rose ceremony, because she never felt confident. That night, I remember her face was trembling. Lindsay looked as though she was going to be sick. AshLee, on the other hand, was staring straight through me.

Did she know?

“Lindsay,” I said, handing the rose to her. One of the directors had hurt his back traveling to Thailand, so he wasn’t in his normal spot off in the background holding a rolled-up piece of paper to indicate when I should call the next name. No one gave me a signal, so I must’ve stood there for several minutes until someone stepped in and waved his or her arms at me. Now that we were so close to the end, the next rose was the last rose.