After confronting Zach Shallcross during the Monday, March 27, finale of The Bachelor, Ariel Frenkel is sharing more insight about her overnight date with the season 27 star.
“He spoke first, he kind of set the precedent for the whole week and the whole evening, which is also what I had a problem with,” the 28-year-old New Yorker said on the “Viall Files” podcast about Zach, 26, making a rule about not having sex with his finalists. “Because throughout the entirety of our relationship, he’s making me feel like an individual. So the difficulty of dating someone that’s dating 30 other people is to feel like an individual. And he made such a point of making me feel that way on our one-on-one [and] in different moments. I never felt like there was anything but us, obviously, knowing there are other people in the mix. .. In saying, for this week, ‘I’m not going to sleep with anyone, I’m not going to do those types of things,’ and starting the full conversation at dinner off that way, I just didn’t appreciate that we’re now more in a collective situation in how we approach our own relationship.”
Ariel added: “And also, we’re not having a conversation. It’s a monologue, not a dialogue. … I feel like it’s very frustrating when someone takes away your ability to even have a fluid conversation. I don’t like when people just come to you with an idea and you’re not having dialogue.”
Zach has openly admitted that his intention not to be intimate in the fantasy suites backfired — especially after he had sex with Gabi Elnicki during the second overnight.
“I had the same intentions as Zach that week, I personally was not ready for intimacy in that setting,” Ariel told Nick Viall. “And I felt like, if I’m in an open relationship, and I know the other person could be with someone else the next night — they’re entitled to do that, in my opinion. It’s not for me to say yes or no — but I’m personally not going to do that in my own, like, experiences. So I really didn’t like that he started the entire date off that way. And he started the whole night off, like, predicated on sex versus us having a private conversation, being off camera, enjoying that time seeing even what happened. I don’t like when you set a standard for how a night should go or date should go. I think you set yourself at a deficit that way.”
According to Ariel, the twosome had a better time when the cameras went down. During their date, they talked about his “issues” with Rachel Recchia last season and “basically everything under the sun until the sun went up.”
“We had so many laughs and it was really nice to talk to someone about the entire experience. Because there’s so many moments — you have 30 minutes to talk to someone, you have to tell them about who you are as a person, your entire life,” she continued. “So I feel like I really wanted to, for once, not have to say everything about myself in a short period, but actually talk about the experience, how he was feeling, what’s going on with him what this whole, like, crazy process feels like off camera. Obviously, we had the most authentic conversations on camera, but when you’re off camera, it just feels more lighthearted. You can kind of breathe in a way. Even if you’re always authentically being yourself. It’s nice to talk about how weird everything is and address kind of how strange this process is to get to know someone. … We talked through the whole night. We fell asleep, probably, in the last 10 minutes.”
After Ariel didn’t receive a rose, she was eliminated and Gabi and Kaity Biggar became the final two. While Kaity, 28, was clued in on Zach sleeping with Gabi, Ariel didn’t find out until she watched the show.
“He actually mentioned that to Jesse [Palmer] that he was going to tell me. So that makes him not a man of his word twice,” Ariel said. “And although he might have known he was sending me home — I’m not going to speculate when that was or when he made that decision — but regardless of me potentially going home and that relationship ending, it doesn’t mean you don’t show that relationship respect with honesty. So even if you know something’s closing and a chapter is ending, it doesn’t mean you should change the way you’re acting [in] that dynamic. So I was still owed an honest conversation. … The reason why he even released the information saying what happened with Gabi, which I also felt like was wrong. … He shouldn’t have said that. He should have run it by Gabi before he decided to tell anyone privately, he should have told Kaity privately, he should have told me privately. So, the way everything was handled frustrates me, but on top of that, I feel like I was owed just that honesty. So regardless of him sending me home, that doesn’t mean that respect just dissipates because he’s decided that we’re no longer in a relationship.”
During Monday’s finale, Zach apologized to both Gabi and Ariel for how he handled “sex week.” He also revealed he and Kaity are happily engaged with plans to move in together in Austin this summer.
