Arie Luyendyk had a big admission during Sunday night's After the Final Rose special.
As he sat next to the woman who had broken his heart just a few months prior, the handsome race car driver confessed he had jetted to Charlotte, North Carolina — Emily Maynard's hometown — in a desperate off-camera bid for closure (or alternately a "beginning") with the blonde beauty who dumped him for Jef Holm.
"It seems crazy now," Luyendyk admitted, adding that, at the time, he felt like he couldn't carry on with the heartbreak Maynard had inflicted and needed to settle things one way or another.
Still, "I thought better of it when I got there," the Scottsdale, Arizona native, 30, said. "It didn't feel right."
Both his friendship with Maynard's fiance, Holm, 28, and his respect for her 6-year-old daughter, Ricki, had him thinking twice about what he was about to do.
Instead, Luyendyk says he called Maynard, and told her he would leave the journal he had kept of his show experience for her to read — hopefully giving her a better understanding of what he had gone through.
Still, as they sat next to one another during After the Final Rose, Maynard handed Luyendyk back the journal, still sitting in its envelope, unopened.
"I didn't read it out of respect to Arie and Jef," Maynard explained, citing her happy partnership with her fiance and adding that "These are [Arie's] memories, and it wasn't going to change anything."
Ultimately, Luyendyk said it was heart-to-hearts with Maynard's love Holm that gave him what he needed to move on.
After hearing how happy his friend is with Maynard, Luyendyk said, "That's what helped me [get over it]," adding that "Jef is a great man."
