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It was real! Bachelor in Paradise may have come to an end, but it left lasting effects on contestant Danielle Lombard. The 27-year-old business owner took to Instagram on Wednesday, September 12, to explain that she had a deep connection with Dean Unglert, even if it did not seem like it on the show.
“It’s heartbreaking and disappointing to see how my relationship was depicted as something only surface level,” she captioned a photo of the pair kissing. “Dean and I’s connection was so much deeper. Call us kindred spirits or free souls…our outlook on life and love was similar (or so I thought).”
The pair were involved in a love triangle with Kristina Schulman, who originally hit it off with Unglert when filming began, and Unglert and Schulman even traveled to her hometown in Kentucky when the show took a brief hiatus. When Lombard arrived later in the season, he decided to pursue her instead and Schulman then left the show. Lombard shared that just because she wasn’t seen being emotional on the show, it doesn’t mean her experience wasn’t hurtful.
“We have a tendency to become defensive when we see someone physically in pain, but just because they never showed me crying or being upset doesn’t mean that I wasn’t,” she wrote. “This show was one of the most challenging, emotionally trying experiences I have endured. Looking back, I never spoke negatively about anyone else. I never told Dean how he should feel or who he should choose. I wouldn’t change anything, all I can do is learn from it and move forward.”
At the end of her post, the reality star pleaded with her followers to invest their energy on things that can change the world instead of spreading negativity in her comments. Unglert also revealed that choosing to leave Schulman on season 4 of the Bachelor spinoff has caused him and Lombard to receive a lot of hate on social media. “I have, like, 20,000 comments on my Instagram page; it’s crazy,” he told Us Weekly on September 6. “But they’re all, like, ‘You’re such a douchebag, I hope you die, I hope you never find love.’”
“I do feel horrible about, you know, watching it back and seeing the way that they were both treated,” Unglert told Us about the love triangle. “But I feel really, really bad about how Danielle has been treated and how she’s receiving so much negativity on her social media outlets. It’s so unfair to her. So for, like, those reasons, the reasons of other people receiving negativity because of me, I regret that.”
Although Lombard and the Los Angeles native have gone their separate ways, she is still open to love, noting in her Instagram post: “Marriage is something that will happen when the right person comes into my life but I am not placing a time restraint on that.”
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