Nearly three months after Kaitlyn Bristowe and Shawn Booth announced that they called off their engagement, the personal trainer opened up about how he is coping in the aftermath.
“Not only were we engaged but it’s like, man, I lost my best friend too,” Booth, 31, said in Us Weekly’s exclusive sneak peek from the Sunday, January 27, episode of Ben Higgins and Ashley Iaconetti’s “Almost Famous: In Depth” podcast.
“I didn’t actually think it was going to be this difficult [to talk about]. I knew it would be hard, but I guess once you actually start opening up about it a little more, it makes it that much harder,” he continued. “It just feels like everything is completely gone — like, Kaitlyn and Shawn gone, everything we’ve had, everything we’ve been through. You know, we were this team and we got through a lot of stuff together, but then just, like, in an instant it’s all gone.”
The Bachelorette season 11 winner acknowledged that he has been trying to avoid social media and “the outside noise” as much as possible in the wake of the breakup.
“It’s nerve-racking every time I pick up my phone,” he said. “I haven’t been on Twitter in months just ‘cause I don’t want to scroll the mentions. Then I go on Instagram — you know, I do that for business purposes — [and] obviously get caught with scrolling, and that’s always tough ‘cause you have a pit in your stomach. … I do not go to the Discover page. I learned that pretty quick. Haven’t been there in a while.”
The former couple, who got engaged in 2015, announced in November 2018 that they were going their separate ways, though they had not been spotted together for months leading up to the news. Booth took a moment to explain the timeline of the split during his appearance on the podcast.
“We were working through things during the summer, but … we were still together,” he clarified. “We ended up, I would say, officially breaking up [in] September and then announcing it in November.”
Bristowe, 33, and Booth said in a joint statement at the time that they were “very much committed to remaining friends” and planned to “continue to support each other in new ways.”
Bristowe is now dating The Bachelorette season 14 alum Jason Tartick. The couple went public with their romance earlier this month, and the banker, 30, recently called his new girlfriend “someone very special.”
“The Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous Podcast” airs weekly on iHeartRadio.
