Michelle Young is currently out here saving the Bachelor franchise from itself filming her season of The Bachelorette, and we truly. cannot. wait. ABC is known for making some highly questionable casting decisions (pls see: the internet spiraling over Greg Grippo potentially being the next Bachelor), but they got it 1,000 percent right with Michelle. She was obviously a huge fan favorite during Matt James’s season of The Bachelor, and producers actually wanted her to be Bachelorette a lot sooner—but Michelle needed to push her season back to accommodate her teaching schedule. Because obviously, these kids > everything:
Flash-forward to literally right now and Michelle (+ her bevy of suitors) is currently filming The Bachelorette over in Minnesota. Which means the time has come to channel our inner sleuth and respectfully go through her past romances and dating history. Starting with, duh:
Michelle was one of Matt’s two final contestants, and she was super committed to their relationship. It didn’t work out, though, and Matt lowkey blindsided her during their breakup.
After the split, Michelle said she didn’t get any closure from Matt. “I needed to say my piece because I didn’t get the chance to,” she told Emmanuel Acho on “After the Final Rose.” “I asked if I could talk to Matt for two minutes—and not to change his [mind], to not get in the way of the relationship that he was pursuing that was still there. Just for me to say my piece. But he refused to have that conversation with me. I think I deserved the two minutes to get my closure and move on.”
She also said as much to Matt, explaining, “I asked you for a conversation, and it was not a conversation where I was trying to change your trajectory or trying to change your mind or fight for you—it was a conversation so that I could have my inner peace when I left Pennsylvania. And you said no.”
FYI, Matt did apologize for how this all went down, saying, “There»s no justification for why I didn’t have that conversation, and if I would’ve known that this is how you were feeling in that moment, then I would’ve fought to have that conversation.”
Michelle got a chance to speak to Matt’s brother John before their breakup, and she opened up about a pretty major relationship in her past. Michelle didn’t give too many details (nor did she name names!) but did tell John that she and her ex broke up after their ’ship “became unhealthy” around January 2020.
“That ended in January,” she said. “It’s something that should have ended before, well before that. Just because it became unhealthy.”
The ex in question (who is a private person so we won’t be sharing his identity) still has a bunch of posts up of his and Michelle’s time together from as far back as 2016, which implies that they dated for about four years before calling it quits.
Michelle is still in the middle of filming The Bachelorette, so we don’t have spoilers about who she ends up with (…yet, though stay tuned). But thanks to her original ABC bio on The Bachelor, we know “her dream man is confident but not cocky and will look at her as his equal in all things,” that she “has big dreams for the future and says she wants a man by her side that is supportive and driven to make the world a better place,” and that she’s “looking for the superman to her superwoman.”
Here’s to hoping she finds him, truly. And psst: If you’re in the mood to check out Michelle’s contestants and make some predictions about whomst she picks, head this way….
