From one lead to another. While many of Clayton Echard’s castoffs — and other members of Bachelor Nation — are slamming the season 26 lead over how he handled the fallout from the fantasy suites, Kaitlyn Bristowe is offering a different perspective.
“I’m just going to speak from personal experience — I can’t say if you’re in that position because when would you ever be in that position, but when you’re in that position, you are making a life-altering decision,” the season 11 Bachelorette said on Tuesday, March 8, via Instagram Stories. “You genuinely fall in love with more [than one] person, so why would you not be intimate with more than one person and when you’re trying to find the person to spend the rest of your life with? Why do we judge so hard on this?”
During Tuesday’s episode, fans watched Clayton’s messy split from Susie Evans after the videographer expressed concerns about the Missouri native sleeping with — and admitting he was falling in love with — the other finalists, Gabby Windey and Rachel Recchia.
Kaitlyn, meanwhile, pointed out that the former football player is “taking every relationship as far as they can go” before proposing, which may include sex.
“I would even care to say that it’s more heartbreaking to meet somebody’s family and then break up with them than it is to be intimate with them,” she continued. “Take it for what it is, but it’s just my opinion. The show is to find someone to spend the rest of your life with. If intimacy is important to you, that’s going to be part of it. And that’s a conversation that you should have with the Bachelor or the Bachelorette when you start to fall in love with them. So, in my opinion, these women should have had that conversation before the fantasy suite, like, ‘Hey, this is either OK with me or it’s not.’ And if you’ve set those boundaries, then that’s a much different story.”
The Dancing With the Stars champ then shared a clip from season 19 of The Bachelor in which guest Jimmy Kimmel asked her — in front of lead Chris Soules — whether she would be mad if the farmer had sex with all three of his finalists.
“No. I can’t be. It’s part of the process,” she said on the show in 2015. “You can’t take out a car without test driving it.”
Kaitlyn subsequently returned to the app with her “final thoughts,” explaining, “I totally get why it would hurt people’s feelings. We’re all different human beings with different emotions and different insecurities and different traumas and different upbringings,” she concluded. “But also, maybe that just goes to show how little I was in love at that point. So, I see all sides like a true Canadian.”
The Bachelor concludes with a two-part finale on ABC Monday, March 14, and Tuesday, March 15, at 8 p.m. ET.
