The 20th season of ABC’s “The Bachelor” concludes Monday night (8, ABC/7) with Ben Higgins revealing his choice among the final two women — in an unprecedented occurrence on the show, he said he had fallen in love with both. (As always, the two-hour finale is followed by the live one-hour special “The Bachelor: After the Final Rose.”)
Higgins, who was 26 when the season filmed, has confirmed he is engaged to either Joelle “JoJo” Fletcher or Lauren Bushnell, and told host Chris Harrison on “The Bachelor: The Women Tell All” special last Monday, “I am more in love than I’ve ever been,” adding, “I would marry that woman tomorrow if I could. She’s incredible.”
Who are these two bachelorettes? Dallas native Fletcher, born in November 1990, gives her profession as real estate developer, and her LinkedIn profile lists her both as owner of Dallas’ JHF Realty Development LLC and as a salesperson in the medical industry. She attended Baylor University in Waco, Texas, from 2008 to 2011, earning a bachelor of applied science degree, according to the profile. Her parents are Soraya Fletcher, a nurse practitioner, and Dr. Joseph Fletcher, who work together at gastroenterology medical associates in Denton, Texas.
Fletcher is the half-sister of Ben Patton, a contestant on producer Eva Longoria’s NBC dating series, “Ready for Love” — and indeed, both JoJo and Soraya Fletcher are listed as advisers at Ben and brother Matthew Patton’s charitable organization, the Patton Hope Foundation.
Bushnell, an Alaska Airlines flight attendant who was 25 during shooting, was raised in West Linn, Oregon, by parents Kristin and Dave Bushnell, the latter of whom has worked as an account executive for several companies. She has three younger siblings: Mollie, Bryant and Brett. A 2008 graduate of West Linn High School, where she was a cheerleader, Bushnell graduated from Whitworth University in Spokane. She now lives in Marina del Rey, California.
She told her family’s local newspaper earlier this year that when being scouted for “The Bachelor,” producers suggested she watch the most recent season of “The Bachelorette,” on which Higgins was a contestant. “They only want you to come on the show if it’s a guy you generally would like,” she said. “After the first episode, Ben was my favorite contestant. So when they announced it was him, I knew I wanted to be on the show. But even then,” she said, “I was never thinking, ‘Oh, I might meet him someday.’ I was just thinking he was such a catch.”
The “catch”-elor himself is a native of Warsaw, Indiana, and an account manager at the software company Talisys in the Denver suburb of Golden, Colorado. At Indiana University, from which he graduated in 2012, he was the student association’s director of faith-based affairs.
“I think my biggest fear with people . . . hearing me express that I am in love with both JoJo and Lauren, is that it will make everyone feel like it’s not real love,” Higgins wrote on his People magazine blog. “Or that I don’t comprehend what love is because I am feeling it for two women at once. But I really do. I gave this more thought than you can possibly imagine.”
