Becca Tilley had her reasons for remaining a virgin into her late 20s.
“I didn’t go on [The Bachelor] wanting to talk about my virginity. I was never going to talk about it because I didn’t want it to be my story line,” Tilley, 37, said on the Monday, April 13, episode of the “Her Rich Life” podcast. “I was like, ‘This is something that I’ve chosen for myself. I don’t need it to be this thing that people have an opinion on.’”
Tilley, who was 25 when she appeared on Chris Soules’ season of The Bachelor in 2015, stayed a virgin because of her religious beliefs.
“I grew up very Christian conservative. It was, like, ‘You don’t chase men, they come to you,’” she recalled of her upbringing. “[We were] nondenominational. … My family is not super intense.”
Tilley further noted that her virginity was a “very protected” part of her life, which is why she was hesitant to share her story on The Bachelor.
“Then, one of the other girls came back from a conversation with him and she was really upset and she’s like, ‘I don’t know how he took it,’” Tilley recalled, referring to Ashley Iaconetti’s own virgin story arc. “I totally forgot I had a microphone on [and] I had seven cameras on me, and I go, ‘I’m a virgin too.’”
As soon as Tilley told Iaconetti, 38, that she never had sex, a producer whisked her away for a confessional interview “immediately.”
“That became my story line, and it was a great thing because I feel there were people [watching] that had made the same choice,” she said on Monday’s episode. “I wanted them to see that you could be confident and sure and know your worth and make that decision for yourself and that [would] be OK.”
Tilley was the runner-up on Soules’ season, revealing on Monday that the farmer, 44, “responded super well” to her virginity bombshell.
“He was very respectful and I never once felt like it was a thing,” she said, adding that she was eliminated in the finale after admitting that she wasn’t in love with Soules.
Soules proposed to Whitney Bischoff but they split months later. As for Tilley, she has since found love with singer Hayley Kiyoko. (Tilley publicly came out as queer in 2022 after privately dating Kiyoko, 35, for several years. They got engaged in 2025.)
“I was very religious and I really wanted to follow the rules I was taught,” Tilley said on Monday when asked about discovering her sexuality. “I think even if there was a part of me that had those feelings for a girl, it was just kind of shut off.”
Tilley, who would now label herself as bisexual, never questioned her identity growing up.
“I never had the experience of feeling like I was in the closet,” she said. “I was so shut off to that concept because I liked guys enough that I was, like, ‘This is just what I’m supposed to do.’ … Hayley’s the first girl that I was, like, ‘I want to kiss her.’”
