The Bachelor alum Ben Higgins has recalled details from the phone call that ended his relationship with Lauren Bushnell and the immediate aftermath of their breakup.
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Ben, 35, selected Lauren, 34, as his The Bachelor winner and the pair got engaged on the show's Season 20 finale, which aired in March 2016.
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After The Bachelor wrapped, the pair spent two months filming a spinoff about their relationship and pending wedding titled Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After?, but they announced their split in May 2017, about six months after the show's finale aired on Freeform.
Well, according to Ben on the May 28 episode of the "Bachelor Happy Hour" podcast, Ben and Lauren called it quits on their relationship long before they publicly announced their split.
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Ben shared with the podcast's co-hosts Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt that everything came crashing down when he and Lauren were offered a televised wedding on Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After?. When they discussed the opportunity off-camera, they both came to the conclusion that their relationship wasn't going to work.
"We were like, 'Are we going to do this? Because if we get married, we better do it on national television, like, no question right?' And we were both like, 'I don't think we're going to get married,'" Ben admitted.
"And that was one of the final episodes. They were done filming maybe a week later and we kind of tried to make it work a little bit longer, and then finally, it was over... About a month-and-a-half into filming [Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After?], we were kind of calling it."
Ben called it "a weird time" in his life, before diving into more details about his split from Lauren.
"As soon as the cameras dropped, I flew to Chicago the next day for a business meeting. I was sitting in a hotel in Chicago, and I remember talking to [Lauren] on the phone," Ben recalled.
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"We were talking and we were like, 'This is done. We know this is done. We're not going to make this work. It's not healthy for either of us. We should just try to move on.'"
Ben then made a bold request on the phone with Lauren.
"I said, 'Here's the deal: I'm gone for a week for work. When I come back, you know what would be really great? Is if you were gone. Because I don't think I can see you in person. It's going to hurt too much,'" Ben shared.
"We both cared that much still, and she was like, 'I agree.' So her mom flew out to Denver and packed up her stuff, and I went to New York City four days later on another work trip. We hadn't talked during those four days."
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Ben said suddenly, he looked across the street in New York City and Lauren was standing there!
"[She] was on the street corner in New York City randomly with Amanda Stanton from my [The Bachelor] season. They were doing an event in New York," Ben explained.
"And you know what I did? I bolted! I took off in the opposite direction. [I was] gone. She was literally across the street in New York."
Ben told Joe and Serena that once he returned home to Denver, Lauren's belongings were all packed up.
"She got so mad at me about this at the time. I think she could laugh about it today, but a lot of the stuff was hers. She had done this deal with People magazine or something and got all the furniture in our house, and it was really beautiful," Ben explained.
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"When I showed up, all the furniture was gone. And so I showed up to this little house that's empty with no furniture, and I still had this lawn chair in the back. So I took my lawn chair and I sat in my living room. The TV was left."
Ben recalled turning on the television and grabbing a bottle of bourbon to help him through his heartbreak.
"I sat my phone on the floor next to me. I thought, 'This is actually a funny picture, let me take a picture of this.' So I took a picture of it, talked about it on [The Ben & Ashley I: Almost Famous Podcast], which launched the week we broke up, and I talked about the breakup," Ben said.
Ben said unloading the story of his split from Lauren on Episode 1 of his podcast "was not planned" and it was just "some brilliance from above" who thought it would be a good idea for Ben to open up about his love life.
"So I took that picture, and it was the saddest picture in the world, and she got mad, which she should've at the time. That was a dumb thing [for me to do]. She was like, 'You made it look like I took everything.' And I was like, 'Well, it made sense. You owned everything. It was yours, not mine," Ben acknowledged.
"She had every right... Honestly, it did make her look terrible... and so bad. But in context, it makes sense. But it was a great picture of my life -- one chair and a bottle of bourbon and a pint of ice cream."
Ben previously called starring on the Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After? spinoff a "mistake" given it had contributed to the demise of his relationship with Lauren.
Ben acknowledged that his priorities were "misaligned at the time" during a September 2023 episode of Jason Tartick's "Trading Secrets" podcast, adding, "I was young and naive. I thought we could get through [it]. So when we broke up, Happily Ever After? stopped... I don't know why I said 'yes' to it."
Ben said when he and Lauren filmed that spinoff, they were already "struggling through stuff" as a couple.
The "stuff" presumably included how Ben had professed his love to runner-up JoJo Fletcher on The Bachelor before proposing marriage to Lauren at the Final Rose Ceremony. Lauren even told The New York Post's Page Six in May 2022 that she had "hit rock bottom" after The Bachelor.
"We'd have really great times and then really hard times... There were many reasons why we did not work as a couple, but I think that show was going to be -- I would say impossible for us to have a healthy relationship through it and coming out of it," Ben explained of Happily Ever After?.
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"Because we became working partners. We had no time. Any time that we had privately, away from the cameras, we were exhausted, or I was working."
Ben admitted he and Lauren stopped communicating and expressing their true feelings to each other. He also said they were in "survival mode" at that point.
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Ben is now happily married to a woman outside of Bachelor Nation, Jessica Clarke, and Lauren is happily married to country singer Chris Lane.
Ben and Jess met on social media and went Instagram official in January 2019. They got engaged in March 2020.
Ben and Jess purchased their first home together in Denver, CO, in December 2020, and the couple got married in a romantic Tennessee wedding in November 2021. (Ben and Jess initially planned to wed in 2020, but they pushed back their nuptials to the following year due to the coronavirus pandemic).
Ben previously revealed in June 2020 that he'd like to start a family within a few years and probably adopt at least one child with Jess.
Jess stayed by Ben's side during difficult times, such as a "breakdown" in 2021 that left Ben soul-searching and reaching out to family and friends for support.
Ben previously admitted that he "lost" himself from being so wrapped up in The Bachelor fame and struggled to navigate life once that attention from others "started to fade."
Lauren, for her part, wed Chris in October 2019. Lauren and Chris now share two sons, Dutton and Baker.
In January, Ben claimed that he looks back fondly on his The Bachelor experience and is glad he and Lauren really tried.
"I have no emotion wrapped around my past relationship with Lauren [now]," The Bachelor alum insisted on an episode of his "The Ben & Ashley I: Almost Famous Podcast."
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Ben quipped, "You could not get me to cry [now]."
However, Ben voiced how he's a little upset that Lauren has downplayed the love she had for him in the media.
"Personally, I hear her now say that maybe love feels differently for her than it did back on her time on the show. And I go, 'I'm glad! Like, you're married with kids. I'm married [too] and, like, yes, love does feel different,'" Ben confirmed.
"I'm glad you're in love with your husband more than you liked me -- or if you liked me at all, like, I'm just glad you like him! That's cool!"
But Ben confessed Lauren "should've gone home" and quit The Bachelor if she wasn't sure about him or serious about their relationship and future together.
"That show was really real for me... I invested, personally, a lot of effort into trying to figure out if it was the path that was going to help me find my partner or not," noted Ben, who also had a brief stint on The Bachelor Winter Games in 2018.
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RELATED LINK: 'THE BACHELOR' FRANCHISE COUPLES NOW: WHO IS STILL TOGETHER?? (PHOTOS)
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