Bachelor Nation knows it isn’t like Katie Thurston to hold back and now that she’s finally addressing her breakup with John Hersey, the former Bachelorette is spilling the tea.
“He dumped me,” the 31-year-old Bachelor alum began on the “Off the Vine” podcast on Tuesday, August 23. “Technically, we actually broke up twice. The first time no one knew about. … Like a week or two [later], we kind of worked through it and decided to get back together, so I thought we were golden.”
Thurston and Hersey, who she sent home during week two of her Bachelorette season, went public with their romance in November 2021, one month after she ended her engagement to winner Blake Moynes.
“I think it was just unavoidable. … Like, we just got [into] a conversation and at one point, I just said to him, … ‘I know more reasons why you don’t like me than why you love me,’” the former bank marketing manager told Kaitlyn Bristowe. “And that’s a really s—ty feeling.”
Thurston acknowledged that “there’s a lot of give and take when it comes to a relationship” before detailing the “big tipping point” that “always piss [her] off.”
“He said, ’I just really need someone who can enjoy my passions and who wants to watch surf, maybe learn surfing with me,” she continued. “I look at him and I go, ‘You realize I jumped out of a f—king plane three times … to join him in his passions. Eight hours of ground school, all these things to partake in ‘his passion’ and somehow that was completely ignored and now we’re focused on surfing. At that point, I knew nothing I did was going to ever be good enough. It was really a blessing in disguise. … I think I would have stuck it out a lot longer than I should have. So like, now I’m in a very good place about it. Then, I was probably the saddest I’ve ever been.”
Bristowe was surprised by Thurston’s revelation, noting that she didn’t picture the San Diego resident as someone who would lose herself in a relationship.
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“I think I was just a little bit, maybe, in denial at first,” Thurston said. “It was such a big deal to date him so quickly after ending my engagement with Blake. So already there was, like, a lot of public opinions about that situation. But I was like, ‘He’s worth it.’ And, to this day, it’s still a little confusing, because since John and I got to know each other as friends, I was like, ‘You knew who I was before we dated, so why is it that once we started dating, you started to question like, oh, I need someone who’s this?’ I never said I was that. It just really caught me off guard and I just really put, like, all my eggs in one basket with this man, and I don’t want to say I regret it because I think every relationship is a lesson, but it was just six months crash and burn.”
Scroll through for more from Thurston on her split from Hersey — including where they stand now — and her feud with Nick Viall:
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