Ben Higgins still wants the best for Lauren Bushnell. The former Bachelor opened up exclusively to Us Weekly about his ex-fiancée’s recent split from Devin Antin, her boyfriend of more than a year.
“From my side, I did hear that, I’ve been asked about it a lot. It’s such an interesting place for me to sit in where all you hope for that person at first, you’re angry and hurt and confused, then all of a sudden you turn to this thing where you’re like there is no good from me being mad,” the 30-year-old told Us at Clayton and Ellen Kershaw’s 6th Annual Ping Pong 4 Purpose at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on Thursday, August 23. “There is nothing good coming from me wishing any ill will on Lauren.”
“Then you start to celebrate her new life, then that ends, and I’m a weird place, like what do I do now?” Higgins, who proposed to Bushnell during the season 20 finale of the ABC dating series, which aired in March 2016, continued. “It’s so cliché to say I want her happy — I just want Lauren to feel fulfilled, joyful and to be celebrated. I know these times in life. I haven’t had to go through it in the last year and a half, but when breakups happen, it’s really raw and hard. So I just hope whatever happens, she can recover with grace. She will. She’ll do alright.”
Us Weekly broke the news earlier this week that Bushnell and Antin called it quits after more than a year together. The twosome, who started dating two months after the Dear Rosé founder announced her split from Higgins in May 2017, met on Tinder.
Before their split, Higgins and Bushnell documented their life together — including the aftermath of Higgins telling both Bushnell and his runner-up, JoJo Fletcher, that he loves them — on the Freeform series Ben and Lauren: Happily Ever After?. Fletcher, who got engaged to fiancé Jordan Rodgers during season 12 of The Bachelorette in 2016, recently revealed to OK! Magazine that she believes her relationship with Higgins may have worked out if he gave his final rose to her over Bushnell.
“First off, I guess it’s super nice of her,” Higgins told Us on Thursday about Fletcher’s remarks. “She’s happy, in a committed relationship, but I get what she’s saying, if we would have ended up together at the end of that, I think her words were that she is so committed to relationships, that she would have tried to make it work no matter what. She has a hard time seeing relationships fail, because she invested all into it. I would like to I would do the same thing. So who knows where that would end up. But I get what she’s trying to say is we would have committed to something that hopefully would have been long term.”
As for Higgins’ love life, the reality TV personality told Us he hasn’t “dated in a long time.”
“It’s not like I haven’t [dated] since Lauren,” he explained. “I guess maybe it’s just a weird place where I am at in life. I haven’t been in Denver, where I live, for the last month, I’ve been gone, traveling consistently. Generous [Coffee] is picking it up, but I’m traveling the world trying to get this coffee company off the ground. I think unfortunately my personal life has maybe gotten pushed behind. I don’t want that, I don’t desire that, I don’t want that long term. But it’s where I’m at now. So I guess I would say I’m not dating, but am interested in dating, open to dating.”
Reporting by Nicholas White
