90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days star Ed “Big Ed” Brown raised eyebrows when he asked Rosemarie “Rose” Vega to shave her legs during the Sunday, April 5, episode, but he insists he didn’t mean any harm.
“I woke up last Sunday morning and it wasn’t a good morning because all of the haters came out,” Ed, 54, told Us Weekly exclusively on Friday, April 3. “I had asked Rose if she would shave her legs, and people were really upset about that. And I was having a conversation with my daughter Tiffany, and she’s like, ‘Dad, look, that’s completely normal. I live in San Diego. Everybody goes to the beach, people laser their legs.’ … So it wasn’t something that I was really used to.”
The San Diego resident also came under fire for asking Rose, 23, to take an STD test, causing their relationship to take a turn for the worse. Since then, he grown closer with his daughter and leaned on her for support.
“She wasn’t judging me. She was like, ‘Dad, hindsight’s 2020. If you would have gotten the test before you left the U.S., when you got there, you would have asked Rose, ‘Hey, I want you to take this STD test,’ because I did, then I showed her what I did,” he told Us. “That would have been, I think, more of the appropriate thing to do. I obviously didn’t handle that very well.”
Ed confirmed that he took an STD test “immediately” after returning to the States and it came back “clean.”
“My daughter gave me the best advice possible, but because I wasn’t talking to her at the time, I wasn’t able to get that feedback from her,” he told Us. “So I wish I would have handled that a lot differently. But we made up, so it’s all good.”
After meeting online, Ed took a 23-hour flight to the Philippines to see Rose in person for the first time.
“The first kiss was very quick. It wasn’t anything too crazy,” he told Us on Friday. “But as we got to know each other, it got a lot better.”
These days, the couple are “definitely in love,” according to Ed. “We’re both very happy,” he told Us.
90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days airs on TLC Sundays at 8 p.m. ET.
