Susie Evans is moving on from Clayton Echard — but don’t expect to see her looking for love on the beaches of Mexico.
“I really don’t think so, unfortunately. … It actually sounds like my nightmare if I’m being honest,” the 29-year-old Susie Was Like blogger said on Us Weekly’s “Here for the Right Reasons” podcast about appearing on Bachelor in Paradise. “I used to be like, ‘Oh, my gosh, so many Paradise couples make it, like, it’s a great way [to meet someone] because you’re getting a ton of different options. You can feel things out, that’s great.’ But then watching it back this season, having been on a show, I was like, ‘This is actually my nightmare.’ You’re on a beach, you’re in a swimsuit, like, ‘No thank you [to being] on camera in a swimsuit ever.’”
She continued: “But anyways, besides that, you’re literally down there and they’re bringing down, like, literal temptation. … They bring down somebody who’s, like, beautiful, funny, smart and all this stuff and it’s like, ‘What?’ … I have a lot of great coping mechanisms. I have a lot of confidence, but I don’t know that I would willingly sign up for that.”
Bachelor Nation met Evans on season 26 of The Bachelor, which aired earlier this year. After their relationship ended on the series, they got back together before calling it quits for good in September.
“I’m definitely focusing in on myself right now,” she told Us about dating again. “I did put a lot of energy and time into my relationship and I really cared about Clayton, and I think that he was going through a lot of tough stuff as well. So, I’m really excited to be able to focus on me right now. I’m definitely open to dating. Somebody asked me on a date yesterday and I immediately started sweating and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ Not because I’m not ready, but just because dating is scary.”
According to Evans, who wrote about their split on her new blog, she and Echard broke up over compatibility issues.
“I see comments still, like, ‘Well, what happened?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, nothing happened!’ He didn’t do anything; I didn’t do anything. We just weren’t really compatible,” she said. “I think it was ultimately, like, expectations of what do you want in a partner? What do you want from yourself? And all of those kinds of things. And we just weren’t really aligned on those things.”
Still, Evans told Us that she wouldn’t “change anything” if she had the chance to talk to herself before she embarked on her Bachelor journey.
“Obviously our relationship didn’t work out and so much could have been different this past year if we had figured that out sooner. But in all honesty, I wouldn’t change anything. So I wouldn’t tell myself to change anything. I would honestly just be there for myself and be like, ‘You’re gonna get through this. This is gonna be really hard at times, but, you know, everything that’s gonna happen to you is gonna help you grow as a person. It’s gonna help you understand yourself better,’” she said. “Whenever we leave relationships, we have that realization of like, ‘Oh, this is what I want in a partner, this is what I don’t want.’ And that’s a given. But I also learned so much about myself through all of this that, which is kind of what led me to the blog. I’ve gone on this, like, major journey in this past year where I’ve really had to look at myself and [ask] like, ‘What? How did I get through all this?’”
Scroll through for more revelations from Evans: