From roses to thorns! Dean Unglert is absolutely done dating in Bachelor Nation.
The start-up recruiter, 27, didn’t hold back from criticizing relationships that have formed within The Bachelor franchise and reflected on his four-month romance with Lesley Murphy.
“None of these Bachelor relationships are real, not a single one of them. … Maybe you’ve got some marriages and some kids and those ones are real, but every one of them’s fake and contrived and I’m not into that,” Unglert told Access on Wednesday, January 9. “Granted, there are some that are real, like those ones I guess, but boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, every single one of them is fake.”
Unglert, who fell for Murphy, 31, while filming Bachelor Winter Games in late 2017, noted that there were “a lot of issues” with their relationship. “I have trust issues when it comes to a lot of things and I always felt like there was a switch that would get turned on, especially to kind of peddle it out to the masses, it never really felt super, super genuine,” he explained. “Just recently I was talking to a friend who was at Winter Games and they were saying how, when the cameras were on, you know, I’m not gonna badmouth Lesley, because she is a great person, but there was a noticeable difference between how someone was acting between when the cameras were on and when the cameras were off and, again, I’m not gonna say anything negative, but I don’t really like that stuff.”
However, Unglert also praised his ex’s new relationship with Dronegear founder Alex Kav: “Good for her. The universe works in weird ways, I guess. I’m happy for her. Hopefully her and her boyfriend are super happy.”
The California native, who previously vied for Rachel Lindsay’s affections on The Bachelorette season 13 before trying his hand at love again on Bachelor in Paradise season 4, also expressed his belief that many Bachelor Nation stars aren’t entering relationships for the right reasons.
“I think contestants on The Bachelor will prioritize a relationship over the person, right? So they’re like, ‘I love being in a relationship more than I love you as a person’ and that stuff, it sucks. That’s just not how it should be. You should love a person and then want to be in a relationship with them, not love the idea of a relationship and then you find someone to be in that with you, because it makes sense,” he noted. “From a marketing side of things, if you’re in a relationship, you get more good notoriety, whatever it is and it’s just like, who cares? I’m not gonna be in a relationship for the sake of, like, image or selling more things on Instagram, you know? So if you wouldn’t be in a relationship if all of that weren’t there, you shouldn’t be in a relationship to begin with.”
He added: “That’s kind of the approach I take and that’s kind of why I never want to get in a Bachelor relationship again because, whether or not, there is an inkling or whisper of a possibility that the other person might be in it because they see the value in it monetarily or whatever, social status wise.”
In October 2018, Unglert exclusively revealed to Us that he’s not interested in finding love within the confines of the ABC dating series. “I think that I’ll stay away from the Bachelor Nation relationship for as long as I can,” he noted. “There’s so much pressure.”
Unglert doubled down on his statement while speaking to Access, insisting, “I feel more strongly about that now than I did when I said that. Never again. Every day it’s compounded even more and more.”
