Ben Higgins opens up about the end of his engagement to Lauren Bushnell Lane.
The Bachelor alum, 35, divided into Bachelor Happy Hour podcast that he and his ex-fiancée, 34, barely spoke and attended couples counseling before they planned to tie the knot.
Higgins proposed to Bushnell Lane during season 20, but the two called off their engagement after the 2017 series Ben & Lauren: Happily ever after?.
But during the Tuesday, May 28 episode of the podcast, he explained to the hosts — and Bachelor in Paradise students — Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt that he and Bushnell Lane “struggled for about a month” to make the spinoff series.
Lauren Bushnell Lane and Ben Higgins. John Lamparski/WireImage Ben Higgins describes a pleasant encounter with ex-fiancée Lauren Bushnell’s husband Chris Lane
He recalled that the former couple asked the former Bachelor host Chris Harrison if they want their wedding to be televised. But he noted that at the time Harrison asked, he and Bushnell Lane were in couples counseling and were “really trying to make it work.”
“We didn’t do that. I mean, we were fighting,” Higgins revealed, adding that when the couple were asked about the televised wedding, “it was like they weren’t talking.”
“We were kind of more business associates,” Higgins said. “We lived in the same house, we didn’t really talk to each other off camera because the cameras would go off at nine o’clock and we’d be exhausted. I might have to go to work the next day. She would do her job with her job, so she would fly a little more as a flight attendant, and we would be dead tired.”
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“We wouldn’t want to talk to each other. We didn’t really talk honestly for weeks,” he recalled. He then added that after receiving the proposal, they agreed to get married on national television, but then they both said during one of the last episodes Ben & Lauren“I don’t think we’re getting married.”
As Higgins continued, he revealed that the day after filming for their spinoff ended, the former couple agreed over the phone that their relationship was “over” and “not healthy” for either of them.
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Jessica Clarke and Ben Higgins. Ben Higgens/Instagram
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Following the couple’s split, Higgins married Jessica Clarke in November 2021. After their wedding, Higgins told PEOPLE, “Here in front of me stood my best friend, glowing with beauty. I’m so happy to have dedicated my life to her.”
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Chris Lane and Lauren Bushnell. Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
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“I’m too happy,” he said, adding that he and Clarke hope to have children in a few years. “The best way to describe it is a feeling of acceptance and love.”
Two years before that, Bushnell Lane married country star Chris Lane in October 2019, and since then the two have had two sons: Baker West and Dutton Walker.
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Source: HIS Education