His reign as the most controversial Bachelor has come to a close. Juan Pablo Galavis reacted to Arie Luyendyk Jr.’s shocking Bachelor season finale in a new interview and explained where the Scottsdale native went wrong.
“I feel bad for him,” the former soccer player, 36, told Entertainment Tonight at the iHeart Radio Music Awards on Sunday, March 11. “I remember my season and I see all the time that I spent with the girls. Obviously you spend like 40 hours with the girls total, so maybe, you know, he went out with [Becca Kufrin] and then he was like, ‘Wow. Is the other girl the one I want?’ That’s what I guess that he did.”
Luyendyk, 36, turned heads during his season 22 finale on March 5 when he called it quits with winner Kufrin, 27, mere weeks after getting down on one knee. The emotional and heart-wrenching breakup was then shown to viewers in an unedited clip.
Galavis also faced backlash after his season 18 finale in March 2014 when he didn’t propose to winner Nikki Ferrell and refused to express his love for her during the After the Final Rose episode. Although the duo dated for seven months and appeared on VH1’s Couples Therapy, Ferrell, 31, eventually broke things off with the professional athlete in October 2014. “She wanted to settle down and he didn’t,” a source told Us Weekly at the time of the split.
The former lead explained to ET why he didn’t feel right about getting engaged to Ferrell. “I always remember what Nikki’s dad told me. ‘If you’re going to propose to my daughter, you’re 100 percent sure you’re going to marry her?’” he recalled. “And for me it was very hard because I have a daughter and I was like, ‘I think the same way as you do. I hope the guy that proposes to my daughter is going to marry her and right now I need to just get to know her better.’”
All things said and done, Galavis thinks the race car driver’s mistake was way worse. “He smashed me,” he told ET, noting that Luyendyk made a major error in judgement by professing his love for both Kufrin and runner-up Lauren Burnham before their overnight dates. “I will not say to two people ‘I love you’ because that’s just not right.”
Although Galavis didn’t walk away from Bachelor Nation an engaged man, Luyendyk surprised fans yet again when he proposed to Burnham, 26, during the After the Final Rose special on March 6. Kufrin was named the next Bachelorette that same evening.
