Arie Luyendyk Jr. Arie Luyendyk Jr. Arie Luyendyk Jr. Say his name three times, and welp, he’s still here. The Bachelor contestant of season 22, who earned—yes, earned—the scorn of millions following his shocking season-finale engagement-calling-off with who sure seemed like the Chosen Woman, Becca K.—and tells the show’s host about the breakup before he does the damn thing—only to then pivot to Lauren B. and propose to her.
You just don’t do that! And definitely not while the cameras are rolling for a 40-minute breakup! Even a Minnesota lawmaker tried to ban him from the state, and Minnesotans are so nice!
Keep in mind, the cameras during this scene were not required. (Gotta say, though, we sort of called this one from the beginning.)
We correctly labeled him as everyone’s ex-boyfriend—but just as The Bachelorette prepares to resume, as it has done and will do for centuries, on this blessed Memorial Day Monday, the man has snagged himself a GQ profile so he can explain things ~ in his own words ~.
You bet we wanted to read it. Here are the best bits from the profile, penned by Rebecca Nelson:
On Arie knowing he’d just stepped in it.
“Arie knew his actions would be ‘wildly unpopular,’ he tells me in between bites of an egg white omelet. Of course he knew. But he had to do it. He’d made the wrong decision, and his heart was elsewhere. What he can’t understand is why more people don’t see that he was just trying to do the right thing for everyone. Really, wasn’t that the brave thing to do? To admit you made a mistake and follow your heart to make it right?”
No. Not while there are cameras rolling.
On falling for Lauren B. while the cameras weren’t rolling.
“On the show, viewers didn’t see much of Arie and Lauren’s relationship, or for that matter, much of Lauren’s personality… That, Arie tells me, was all part of the producers’ storyline, and a product of selective editing. They painted her as the ‘pretty, quiet one,’ not the sweet, funny woman she actually is. It didn’t help that she was cripplingly camera-shy, virtually shutting down in front of the crew. To make her feel more comfortable, Arie asked the producers to film their interactions from farther away, or from behind, so they wouldn’t be as intrusive. It was during stolen moments, away from the cameras, that he says he fell for her.”
Even more happened, apparently, while the cameras weren’t rolling: They talked about Important Things Couples Need to Talk About, like career goals and family. (Nelson even interviewed his dad, who says he’s never seen his son “in love like this before.”) Also, Lauren B. seems really nice from Nelson’s account.
On Arie’s memory retention.
“He tends to remember critical moments in their relationship by what she was wearing, like when he dreamily recalls that she was ‘wearing all white’ on the night of their first kiss.”
But sometimes life’s most important moments happen when you’re wearing an oversized T-shirt and leggings with a gaping hole on the inner-thigh seam, right? (…Right?)
On how—brace yourself—he decided to end things with Becca.
Apparently he’d just had his final date with Becca, which ended at 3 A.M., and he got woken up at 7 A.M. Like all of us, Arie does not make his best decisions during ungodly hours.
“Even the morning he proposed, he was feeling conflicted. But there was a production schedule to adhere to—there were all the cameras, the crew, all the people who had flown down to Peru. The whole point of the show, what he’d hoped for at the outset, was an engagement. That 3-carat Neil Lane ring was burning a hole in his pocket.
So he proposed to Becca.
‘I felt like I was trying to be logical. I tried to think like, “Okay, I know who Becca is, and she’s a great person,”‘ he tells me over brunch. ‘In the moment, I felt like I was making the right choice.'”
On sliding into Lauren’s DMs.
“But he was haunted by the thought that he’d let his soulmate slip away. On New Years’ Eve, he DMed Lauren on Instagram—production wouldn’t give him her phone number—and asked if they could talk. He called her the next day. ‘As soon as I heard her voice,’ he tells me, ‘I knew that I had to end things with Becca.'”
According to Nelson, Arie went to the producers, who he claims were the ones who pitched bringing in the cameras. He says they told him that the viewers seeing him follow his heart and go back to Lauren B. would support him because he “did it for love.”
On betrayal, two times.
“You’ve got to understand, he tells me, these people were my friends. He’d just spent months with the crew. He trusted them. But now? He feels ‘100 percent’ betrayed.
Take the breakup with Becca, billed by the show as ‘the first completely unedited scene in reality television history.’ In the excruciating 40 minutes that aired, Becca repeatedly asks Arie to leave the house where—before he dumped her—they were supposed to be having a romantic getaway. Painfully, he sticks around, even knocking on the bathroom door as she cries to ask if she’s okay.”
On what actually went down.
“‘It was completely edited,’ Arie says. ‘I was told to stay on that couch. I tried to leave, and then production was like, “You need to go back inside. She’s finally calming down. I feel like you owe it to her to have this conversation.” So then I went back in the house.’
Really? You tried to leave and they wouldn’t let you?
‘Yeah. I left, came back. I stepped away from the couch, I went back to the couch.’ But they kept talking him into staying. ‘They cut out, obviously, production talking to me from 10 feet away,’ he says, and calling it unedited ‘was super unfair to me.’ (A spokesman for Warner Bros., which handles production for The Bachelor, declined to comment.)”
Of course, as Nelson points out, the Bachelor producers have so much footage that they can practically craft the storyline of the show however they want—it’s very, very creative nonfiction.
But.
But.
But then he wonders why people aren’t thanking him.
On people being ungrateful.
“So, he argues, why aren’t more people thanking him?” If he hadn’t filmed it, he argues, Becca would have “had to face uncomfortable questions about why they broke up on…After the Final Rose.” And she wouldn’t have been the next Bachelorette!
On the entire damn mess.
“‘I think if you look back at it now, it was positive for everyone. Everyone ended up getting closure and also an opportunity to be with the person that they were really meant to be with’—he with Lauren, and Becca with one of the twenty-odd suitors who will be vying for her affections come May 28. ‘I don’t understand why I’m the fall guy for filming the breakup on a television show which we all signed up to be on.'”
On overarching lessons.
“Maybe in a year or two or ten, Arie will recognize his role in the dumpster fire that was his season of The Bachelor. But he doesn’t deserve the entirety of our outrage. Like so many Bachelor villains before him, he was engineered by the show, warped and edited to fit neatly into a role. With every new season, viewers demand more: more sobbing, more heartbreak, more shocking twists. That thirst for drama essentially demanded that, at some point, an Arie would emerge. Arie may be the most hated man in America, but we created him.
And, anyway, what does he care? ‘The fact is, I’m really happy with Lauren,’ Arie says. ‘So for me, it was all worth it.'”
K.
Read the fantastic piece in all of its exceptional entirety here.
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