Bachelor Nation fans saw Clayton Echard look for love on Season 18 of “The Bachelorette” and again on Season 26 of “The Bachelor” as the leading man.
Since his time on the Bachelor Nation shows, he’s kept fans updated online about his life off-screen and adventures he’s experienced ever since.
Now, he’s joined Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt on “Bachelor Happy Hour” to discuss how backlash from the Internet affected him after his season and whether he has any “Bachelor” regrets.
Clayton opened up and revealed that people’s comparisons of him to every new Bachelor has made him really question himself.
“From one season to the next, it’s hard because you try to avoid it, but I get compared to every Bachelor,” he said. “Every season, it’s like, ‘This guy’s better than him.’ So my sense of self for a while kept getting rocked...In my head, it was like one negative comment held the weight of 50 positive comments. It got to the point where I’d see in my DMs somebody saying like, ‘I think you’re awesome,’ and I wouldn’t read the message. But then I’d see like, ‘You piece of…’ you know what, and I’d click on it because I was like, ‘What are they saying?’ So I would start skipping past the positive comments because I was just looking for, as a people pleaser, how can I get everybody to like me? Why does this person hate me?”
Clayton then shared that after a while, he decided to start focusing on who he really is and build upon that instead of the negativity.
“When everyone seemingly hated me when I came off the show, I was like, ‘Well, I hate myself too,’” he admitted. “I don’t even like this version of me, so [I can] either build back up that same version that everyone doesn’t like or build back up the real version of [me]. And so I decided to build up the real version of me.”
Clayton also admitted that reading the comments online both negatively and positively affected him.
“Every day I woke up I was just reading new comments and then taking them to heart and saying, ‘Okay, these people think I’m stupid, so how do I prove that I’m not stupid?’” he expressed. “I was trying to prove to myself that I had value and that I was actually inquisitive and smart and I had emotional intelligence. But the reality was, I don’t think I had the emotional intelligence like I do today and I still have a long way to go… I think reading the comments was both destructive but also what I needed. Because I needed people to hold me accountable and I wasn’t holding myself accountable.”
Clayton then revealed what he would do differently now if he was the Bachelor today.
“I would communicate times a thousand,” he said. “And I think it’s shared responsibility. I do wish a couple of the women would have been more communicative… But at the same front, I should’ve asked more questions. I wasn’t asking enough. So this time around, if I were to do it a second time, I would ask way more questions so that there aren’t any surprises.”
