'The Bachelor' alum Ben Higgins suggests the show's use of his old footage is damaging his marriage to Jessica Clarke

The Bachelor alum Ben Higgins has suggested the show's use of his old footage is damaging his new marriage to Jessica Clarke and he's worried The Bachelor producers will show something that "ruins" it.


Ben, who starred on The Bachelor's 20th season, has been featured in recent The Bachelor promos due to a similar storyline he and current Bachelor Clayton Echard shared.

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On Ben's season, he told his runner-up JoJo Fletcher and winner Lauren Bushnell that he loved them both, which resulted in a tense and emotional finale in 2016, and Clayton was just shown telling three women he's in love with them on Season 26.

"I haven't had a producer text me in three years. They don't give me any heads-up anymore," Ben said during Monday's episode of his "The Ben and Ashley I: Almost Famous Podcast," which he co-hosts with Ashley Iaconetti.


"And then I just saw a preview of my proposal [to Lauren] during The Bachelor [finale teaser], and I was like, 'Come on, guys. I'm married, like, can we stop ABC?'"

Ben, who tied the knot with Jessica in November 2021, broached the sensitive subject during an interview with former The Bachelor star Colton Underwood, who revealed producers had given him a heads-up that his ex-girlfriend Cassie Randolph would be making an appearance on the show's two-night finale event this week for Clayton's season.

"How does that make you feel, though?... I think The Bachelor franchise, for me, became just so toxic and such a business that I didn't want to be involved in how they handle things like that," Colton said.

"So I stepped away. How do you reconcile that with yourself, internally, when they continue to do things that don't sit well with you or don't give you a heads-up?"

Ben responded, "Personally, I think it's more hard for Jessica than it is for me."


"For me, it is a memory and a lot of times, it is a blur in my life. It obviously was a very real relationship and a very real time for me that, you know, I've worked hard on moving on from."

Ben said there was no immediate, "Okay, this is over and now I can get past it."

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Once Ben and Lauren got engaged on The Bachelor 20, they starred on a spinoff, Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After?, which aired on Freeform after their The Bachelor season wrapped on TV and featured the pair planning a wedding.

But Ben came down with a case of cold feet, and he and Lauren called off their engagement and split in May 2017.


Following his breakup with Lauren, Ben also appeared on The Bachelor: Winter Games, which aired on ABC in 2018, but quit the spinoff after admitting he was still struggling get over his relationship with Lauren and wasn't ready to date again yet.

"That relationship affected me in a lot of different ways -- good and bad," Ben shared on his podcast.

"And so I've worked personally on getting away from that to then invest, fully, into my wife. That's a big deal and that's hard enough, to be married and to give up a lot of yourself for your partner."

Ben, however, said that he understands how he had "fully agreed" to the show and its terms.

"I agreed to be the lead of this show. And I fully understand that you own the rights to everything that happened on the season for perpetuity," Ben noted.


"And so however [ABC uses] that, I cannot be upset, because I agreed to that."

But that doesn't make handling a constant rehash of his past mistakes and failures any easier.

"I don't have to like it. I don't have to enjoy it. And I hope they care about me enough at this point where they're like, 'I don't want to show something that, like, ruins his marriage,'" Ben pointed out.

He went on to clarify, "I don't know if they have that power, but [I hope] they don't show something that causes, you know, drama within my marriage."

"I hope they respect me enough for that. I don't know. That has yet to be seen," he added.


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Regardless, Ben acknowledged "it still isn't fun and it's still not ideal" to watch himself tell two people, "I love you," or be reminded of his broken engagement to Lauren.

"It still makes me cringe. I'm like, 'Gosh damnit, I don't want to watch myself with another human.' That's not where my mind is at," Ben shared. "But I understand what I did and I understand that I gave up [that footage willingly]."

Ben concluded that as much as he's moved on and doesn't have much of a connection with The Bachelor franchise anymore, he understands "that they still have that piece of me."

"And shoot, they want to show a couple more clips of me? Maybe that helps my social-media following," Ben said, trying to look on the bright side of things. "I don't know."

Ben and Jessica's relationship began in December 2018 when Ben apparently saw Jessica's photo from a hockey game she had gone to with her father and decided to direct message her on Instagram.


After chatting on FaceTime, the pair met in person and Ben asked her to be his girlfriend.

Ben and Jessica went Instagram official in January 2019.

They continued to make a long-distance relationship work, with Ben being in Denver most of the time and Jessica living in Nashville, where she attended esthetics school.

Ben proposed marriage to Jessica in early 2020, and then they purchased their first home together in Denver in December of that year.

But Ben and Jessica had agreed to abstain from sex until marriage to ensure their first encounter would be special, and so they didn't move in together until after their wedding.

Ben and Jessica had to postpone their initial 2020 wedding due to the coronavirus pandemic, but they ended up getting married in a "simple and beautiful" wedding ceremony at The Estate in Cherokee Dock near Nashville in November 2021.


Ben has said he and Jessica are now looking to expand their family; however, they are in no rush to have children and decided to start with a dog named Waylon.

Jessica has stayed by Ben's side even during the most difficult times, such as a "breakdown" in Summer 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 fame and struggled to navigate life once that attention from The Bachelor "started to fade."

For Lauren's part, the Season 20 The Bachelor alum is married with one child to country singer Chris Lane.

Before starring on The Bachelor, Ben competed for Kaitlyn Bristowe's heart on The Bachelorette's eleventh season.

RELATED LINK: 'THE BACHELOR' FRANCHISE COUPLES NOW: WHO IS STILL TOGETHER?? (PHOTOS)


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About The Author: Elizabeth Kwiatkowski