Colton Underwood is telling all about his private life off camera before, during, and after he appeared on ABC's The Bachelor in 2019.
In a conversation on the We Need to Talk podcast with matchmaker and relationship guru Paul C. Brunson, Underwood spoke about how far he felt he had to go to keep his sexuality a secret.
"I was very careful, even when I was physically experimenting with guys and trying to, like, figure myself out," Underwood said. "I was so careful on how I did everything."
As a result, Underwood would only hook up with married men to keep his private life a secret.
"To protect myself, I would only hook up with married straight men," he revealed. "So, that was sort of my rule that I would never break. When I was in the closet, that would be the only time I would ever hook up with men was if they were married." He explained that was "because they had more to lose than I did."
"So, if they tried to, you know, ruin my career and my life for football, they had a whole family that they’d be risking as well," Underwood explained. "It’s a messed up thing to think through."
Underwood said he's now come to terms with that choice, calling it an act of self-preservation.
"It was just like a way to protect myself. I mean like looking back on it now, I wish I would have been a little bit more vulnerable about just talking about my struggle with my sexuality. I think there could have been something just interesting in that conversation."
The former NFL player made his reality show debut on The Bachelorette in 2018 when Becca Kufrin was the leading lady. The following year, Underwood starred on his own season of The Bachelor.
Underwood explained that his nickname 'Virgin Bachelor' really irked him, mainly because it might invite curious people to investigate his past relationships.
"I remember I always got asked why I was a virgin. So, that was the storyline that they wanted to run with. I hated it beause I didn’t want that pressure, and then I also didn’t want people digging in because at that time, I had hooked up with men," he said.
Underwood made it clear... that was the producers' doing. He never intended the central focus of his story to be his virginity.
"I went into it like, my whole heart was like, 'I'm not going to disclose to them that I'm a virgin no matter what,'" he recalled, but then spilled the beans anyway.
"I literally told them I was a virgin on night one of The Bachelorette. I opened it up immediately, and I just gave them everything, which they loved. So, that’s unfortunately how it sort of came to be, and then it became my entire storyline."
Even though he wasn't technically a virgin since he experimented with men prior to The Bachelor, Underwood leaned into the virgin narrative due to his religious upbringing and an internalized fear of coming out as gay.
"There were so many reasons why I was a virgin," he said. "Like it was my faith. Obviously the one that I didn’t tell publicly was my struggle with my sexuality."
Watch the entire interview on the We Need to Talk podcast below.
