Ben Higgins is letting fans in on what happened near the end of his engagement to Lauren Bushnell.
The Bachelor season 20 star opened up about it on the Tuesday, May 28, episode of the “Bachelor Happy Hour” podcast, revealing that as the two were filming Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After?, they were barely talking to each other and were attending couples counseling.
Ben & Lauren, a spinoff showing Higgins, 35, and Bushnell, 34, in their post-Bachelor and pre-married lives, ran for one season before the couple split in 2017.
“We were butting heads,” Higgins told podcast hosts and Bachelor in Paradise alumni Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt.
Higgins explained, “We were kind of more work associates. We were living in the same house, we weren’t really speaking to each other off camera because the cameras would leave at 9 o’clock, we’d be exhausted. I might be having to go to work the next day. She would be doing her thing with her job, and so she was still flying as a flight attendant a little bit and we’d just be, like, dead tired.”
This isn’t the first time Higgins has spoken about how he and Bushnell struggled to make things work while filming their own show. In September 2023, he told Jason Tartick on his “Trading Secrets” podcast that filming Ben & Lauren made it “impossible” for the two to have a healthy relationship.
Higgins also revealed to Amabile and Pitt that former host Chris Harrison asked if he and Bushnell wanted to have their wedding televised, but at the time, the two were already in counseling and “were really trying to make it work.”
Ultimately, however, the two were living separate lives, and both admitted near the end of their spinoff series that they did not think they would get married.
“We wouldn’t talk to each other. We hadn’t talked to each other really truly in weeks,” he said.
The day after filming wrapped on the series, Higgins and Bushnell spoke on the phone, deciding to end things as the relationship had grown “not healthy” for either of them.
Both have since married, with Bushnell tying the knot with Chris Lane in 2019, then welcoming sons Baker and Dutton Walker. Higgins met Jessica Clarke via Instagram in 2018, and the two got married in 2021.
“She’s a very kind, pure, emphatic and supportive person in general. And she’s not only like that to me. I’m part of that, but she’s like that to everybody around her,” Higgins told Us about Clarke in April 2019. “She challenges me to be more empathetic, more loving, more caring, more kind as well. So I’m very happy.”
