Another Bachelor Nation love story has come to an end. Colton Underwood and Cassie Randolph didn’t have the traditional romance — or even the traditional Bachelor timeline. However, from the moment they met on the season 23 Bachelor premiere, the pair were connected.
Although their onscreen journey wasn’t an easy one (the fence jump!), they began a real relationship after the cameras stopped.
“It was a lot of changes, for sure, because we went from these more simple, more normal lives and then all of a sudden, we film a show and then you’re thrown into craziness where everyone is very hyperaware of everything that goes on in your life and your relationship,” the speech pathologist told Us Weekly exclusively in October 2019. “It was a little bit of a struggle at first, I think — like adjusting to everything. But I feel like now we’ve kind of gotten used to it and learned to balance everything a lot more.”
The former NFL player also noted that the show actually helped them grow their relationship.
“I think you learn to communicate too,” he explained. “Just with whether it’s tabloids or someone speculating a certain thing or people reading into your body language, you know. You just learn how to communicate with each other and you’ll be on the same page with everything going on. … Nobody could ever prepare you for what life is like after that. Like, you can have people tell you all you want, like, ‘Oh, wait for this, wait for this.’ But until you’re in it, you don’t really get the full magnitude of it.”
Colton later revealed that while he got a great outcome, he felt a bit “burnt” by the shows’ producers.
“They always asked to rank the girls. And very early on, Hannah [Godwin] was up there. And she got left off of a date,” he said in August 2019. “I sort of recall remember feeling a little burnt when they did that. I was like, ‘So let me get this straight. Hannah’s No. 1 on my list right now, and she’s not getting a date this week?’”
He then decided to change things: “From there on out, I was like, ‘All right, if you’re going to do that to my top girls, I’m not really going to tell you who my top girls are, because I don’t want you messing with them.’ So in a weird way, I tried to defend myself and defend the girls by not being truthful to them who my top was.”
However, in May 2020, the pair announced that they had split.
Scroll through the gallery below for a full timeline of Colton and Cassie’s relationship:
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