Opposed to the proposal! Vanessa Grimaldi didn’t want to get engaged to Nick Viall on The Bachelor, but he still got down on bended knee during the ABC reality show’s 21st season finale, which aired in March 2017.
Grimaldi, 32, discussed the proposal on the Tuesday, October 22, episode of the podcast “Let’s Talk About It With Taylor Nolan,” and Us Weekly has an exclusive sneak peek at the behind-the-scenes scoop.
“I didn’t want to get engaged. They didn’t air this,” the Canada native tells host and best friend Taylor Nolan, a fellow contestant on The Bachelor season 21.
She continued: “I had a conversation with him, and I said, ‘Listen, wouldn’t it be better if we just date outside of the show and then get engaged? ‘Cause that’d be more meaningful. We’d get to know each other.’”
Viall, 39, suggested that they go through with the engagement as a gesture of commitment, according to Grimaldi. “He brought up something really important, and I think if we weren’t engaged, we would’ve broken up sooner,” she explains in the podcast.
She goes on: “He said, ‘I know to you it could be just a piece of jewelry, but there’s so much meaning towards us leaving engaged because there’s going to be so much attention. There’s going to be so much, like, backlash on us once we’re done with the show. At least this is going to hold us so much more. It’s going to hold us together. It’s going to hold us together more than it’s true. ‘Cause you have, like, something you’re working towards, right?’ And I wouldn’t have said yes if I didn’t picture him as someone that I could’ve potentially grown with.”
Grimaldi broke up with Viall in August 2017, and the No Better You founder is currently dating businessman Josh Wolfe. But she’s philosophical about her time on reality TV. “I was 28, I think, when I went on the show,” she tells Nolan. “I was ready for marriage. I was ready for a family. I was ready to uproot my life, and I did. And so, to me, it all made sense, ‘cause I’m like, ‘Wow, I went through all these breakups that literally were so hard on me to for me to be on the show, and so maybe it was meant for me to be on the show and it was meant for me to date Nick and it was meant for me to have this life.’”
Plus, Grimaldi’s Bachelor stardom may have led to her relationship with Wolfe. “It’s crazy,” she adds in the podcast. “I really do believe everything happens for a reason. Listen, if I hadn’t gone on to the show, I don’t know if Josh would have slid into my DMs.”
The special ed teacher raved to Us about her “very exciting” relationship with Wolfe in January, and she revealed on the Monday, October 21, episode of the podcast “Help! I Suck at Dating” that she has “been sending Josh pictures of engagement rings.”
The newest episode of the “Let’s Talk About It With Taylor Nolan” podcast on Wave Podcast Network will be released on Tuesday, October 22, at 12 a.m. ET.
With reporting by Kayley Stumpe
