Who is Arie Luyendyk Jr., really? Rebecca Nelson spent two days in Scottsdale with Arie and his fiancé Lauren to learn about who he really is and hear his side of The Bachelor's cringeworthy finale. 
 
 I'm on the back of Arie Luyendyk, Jr.'s new Harley, on what is essentially a date from The Bachelor. We're racing down the manicured streets of Scottsdale, Arizona, and I'm gripping his obliques with my forearms, hands clasped in front of him, because I don't want to fall off this hurtling death machine. Arie knows it's my first time on a motorcycle, so when he guns the engine, I look down at the speedometer in panic. (We're going 37.) He must have felt my muscles tense, because he pats my hands, which are now sweating, reassuringly. 
 
 "You're doing great!" he shouts over the din. 
 
 Approximately 17 hours later we arrive at our destination, an organic grocery/cafe that makes a great cappuccino (he's from Europe, so he knows a great cappuccino). His dad was a successful race car driver, winning the Indy 500 twice, and Arie followed in his tracks, starting his own racing career at 16. Our day so far—heart-pounding daytime activity, then an intimate meal to talk about DEEP STUFF—echoes one of the meticulously choreographed dates from the ABC reality series in which he recently starred. After a failed turn on a previous season of The Bachelorette, he served as the 22nd season's leading man, dating and dumping every one of the 29 tanned and bikini-ready women. Barely five minutes after we sit down, before I even have a chance to ask about it, he brings up the climax of what's widely considered the most dramatic season ever. 
 
 (A quick recap for non-Bachelor diehards: After saying "I love you" to two women in the "romantic sands, shores, and mountains" of Peru, he proposed to Becca Kufrin, a bubbly, 28-year-old publicist from Minnesota. Weeks later, he realized he'd made a terrible mistake—he actually belonged with the runner-up, Lauren Burnham, a reserved, 26-year-old saleswoman from Dallas. So he broke up with Becca, and, even though the season had ended and cameras were no longer required to document their every relationship move, he invited the Bachelor crew to film the breakup. Then he proposed to Lauren.) 
 
 In the days and weeks after the finale aired, he was digitally crucified on Twitter. Fans branded him the worst bachelor in franchise history (which, really, was quite an achievement). They called him cruel and heartless and a dirty rotten snake and said he should be ashamed of himself. One proactive Minnesota state lawmaker drafted a bill to ban Arie from the state. Even former cast members, who understand the behind-the-scenes of the show more than most, piled on. "I don't like this one bit," tweeted former bachelor Sean Lowe during the breakup scene. "Shouldn't have filmed." 
 
 Arie knew his actions would be "wildly unpopular," he tells me in between bites of an egg white omelet. Of course he knew. But he had to do it. He'd made the wrong decision, and his heart was elsewhere. What he can't understand is why more people don't see that he was just trying to do the right thing for everyone. Really, wasn't that the brave thing to do? To admit you made a mistake and follow your heart to make it right? 
 
 Even before he was on The Bachelor, Arie, who's 36, was a sucker for cheesy dating shows—90 Day Fiance, Married at First Sight, Dating Naked, the whole bit. He's also kind of a dork. One night at dinner with him and Lauren, he tells me his go-to karaoke song is The Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feeling," and proceeds to belt out a heartfelt rendition at the table ("you never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your liiiiiips / and there's nooooo tenderness like before in your fingertips"). "This is all being recorded, just so you know," Lauren reminds him. He keeps going. 
 
 Over the two days I spend in Arizona, Arie makes it clear that he's down to spend as much time with me as possible. He drives me around in his Ford F-150 Raptor, and let's me tag along while he and Lauren go house hunting. We eat multiple meals together. He even tries to convince me to hike nearby Camelback Mountain with them. (I politely decline.) It's not often that celebrities want to spend hours and hours with a reporter, especially after getting torn apart in countless thinkpieces. His unguarded nature is charming, in a way. It's easy to see how he was able to fall in love on national television three times. 
 
 Arie never thought he'd be on a reality show, let alone one of the genre's biggest villains. In 2011, when he was getting over a difficult breakup, he got drinks with a woman he used to date who'd become a producer for the Bachelor franchise. They'd cast a racecar driver for the upcoming season of The Bachelorette, she explained, and wanted to get his thoughts on the guy. Arie told her their suitor was a great dude. A month later, she called him up: The racecar driver couldn't do the show after all. Would Arie be interested in taking his spot? At 6-foot-2, with rakishly graying hair and a dorky hot dad vibe, he certainly fit the bill. The show started filming in five days, but he figured he didn't have anything to lose. Maybe he'd come back in one week, maybe ten. In any case, it seemed like it would be a fun vacation. 
 
 The other 24 contestants had been preparing for months. They'd meticulously planned their wardrobes, guzzled their green juices, lifted weights every day. "I was, like, the guy in the corner putting Nutella on French bread, making cappuccinos," he tells me with a laugh. Despite his lack of preparation, he made it to the final two suitors, but single mom Emily Maynard ultimately chose Jef (one f) Holm instead. Arie was gutted. 
 
 So he went back to his life in Scottsdale, racing and getting his real estate license and dating. Oh, he was dating. Multiple ex-girlfriends accused him of having "hoes in different area codes," including fellow Bachelor star Courtney Robertson, who wrote in her 2014 memoir that Arie was dating another woman the entire time they were together. (They've remained friends, and he rents her a condo just a few blocks from the restaurant where we're brunching.) In September, right before the news broke that he would be the next bachelor, ex-girlfriend Sydney Stempfley tweeted, like some kind of oracle, "The show would be perfect for @ariejr up until it comes to choosing just one." Arie denies any infidelity. Everyone has a past, he tells me. "What 36-year-old man hasn't dated around if they're single?" 
 
 ABC called him every year to see if he'd be on Bachelor in Paradise, or its predecessor, Bachelor Pad. He wasn't interested. But after years of dating around, he was ready to get serious. He desperately wants (two to four) kids—he loves kids, volunteers at the Phoenix Children's Hospital—and he was feeling lonely in his Scottsdale condo. When the producers floated the idea of him being the bachelor, it was an easy decision. 
 
 Everyone thinks he must be some reality TV ham, that he loves the spotlight. But that's not him at all, he says. He often gets overwhelmed by the attention, by fans who crowd him begging for selfies. When I ask Lauren to tell me a story that typifies Arie, she starts talking about his anxiety. At a race recently, a flock of girls recognized him and started calling his name. He panicked and took refuge in a trailer. It strikes me as an odd story to epitomize your fiancé, even if you've only known each other for a few months. 
 
 "As soon as I heard her voice, I knew I had to end things with Becca." 
 
 That first night at the Tuscan-style estate that's known in Bachelor parlance as "the mansion," Arie met the 29 women who'd be vying for his affections. Of the four women named Lauren, one stood out: Lauren B., a saleswoman from Texas. He'd actually met her before, at a race in Dallas earlier that year. Lauren, who'd been a fan of the show before trying out for the cast, recognized him at the race and asked for a picture. When she stepped out of the limo at the mansion to greet him, she brought the photo in a frame, but ABC cut it out of the season premiere. 
 
 On the show, viewers didn't see much of Arie and Lauren's relationship, or for that matter, much of Lauren's personality. One reporter even compiled every line of dialogue she had on the show in a brutally concise post. That, Arie tells me, was all part of the producers' storyline, and a product of selective editing. They painted her as the "pretty, quiet one," not the sweet, funny woman she actually is. It didn't help that she was cripplingly camera-shy, virtually shutting down in front of the crew. To make her feel more comfortable, Arie asked the producers to film their interactions from farther away, or from behind, so they wouldn't be as intrusive. It was during stolen moments, away from the cameras, that he says he fell for her. 
 
 But how could you know you were in love with someone if you only saw moments of her personality? 
 
 "I just kind of fell in love with her before I really knew who she was," Arie says. "I know that sounds kind of crazy, but I think there is that type of love out there where you just are blown away from the moment you meet somebody. That's kind of how it was with her." 
 
 Since the show wrapped, Arie and Lauren have grown inseparable. They road tripped from her parents' home in Virginia to Arizona, and they realized they're just so similar, Arie says. They have the same goofy sense of humor and love reciting lyrics to the same rap songs, like "Freaky Friday" by Lil Dicky and Chris Brown. In fact, they went out the other night and saw the rapper Ty Dolla $ign. They danced with him all night, broadcasting the bedlam in their Instagram stories. It wasn't until the next morning that they realized it wasn't actually Ty Dolla $ign. "We laughed so hard," he says. "I don't know. It's kind of hard to talk about our relationship and encompass it to make it easy for people to understand." 
 
 His dad, Arie Sr., says he's never seen his son in love like this before. "It's like there's one person, almost, between the two of them," he says. "They're so connected." 
 
 Off camera, Arie says he and Lauren did have substantive conversations: about her family, her prior engagement, how she dreams of getting into medical sales. With her, he never needed to subtly touch his eyebrow, his signal for the producers to get him out of a conversation with someone he wasn't feeling. Lauren was around for much of my time in Scottsdale, and she was far more personable than the show depicted. She spoke a normal amount, asking me thoughtful questions about other people I've written about and where I'm from. She seemed eager to hang out, suggesting we go to a spa ("People love spas here!") or maybe get tickets to Cavalia, a Cirque du Soleil-like show with horses. (We didn't do either.) 
 
 She wasn't working yet, but planned to go to real estate school so she and Arie could go into business together. In the meantime, she was going to barre class and getting her nails done and poring over wedding magazines. Not that she needed much dress inspo: Arie, she tells me, already had an idea of what he wanted her to wear on their big day. "He just pictures something delicate, with straps, and form-fitted, and long," Lauren says. He tends to remember critical moments in their relationship by what she was wearing, like when he dreamily recalls that she was "wearing all white" on the night of their first kiss. 
 
 By the time Lauren donned an off-white beaded gown for the proposal day in November, she hadn't opened up as much as Arie had hoped. At least not as much as Becca, who "was so herself, on and off camera," he says. He needed more time—he asked for more time—but the day after his final date with Becca was decision day. "My date with Becca ended at three in the morning, and then production woke me up at seven in the morning, and they were like, 'Okay, who is it?'" Even the morning he proposed, he was feeling conflicted. But there was a production schedule to adhere to—there were all the cameras, the crew, all the people who had flown down to Peru. The whole point of the show, what he'd hoped for at the outset, was an engagement. That 3-carat Neil Lane ring was burning a hole in his pocket. 
 
 So he proposed to Becca. 
 
 "I felt like I was trying to be logical. I tried to think like, 'Okay, I know who Becca is, and she's a great person," he tells me over brunch. "In the moment, I felt like I was making the right choice." 
 
 But he was haunted by the thought that he'd let his soulmate slip away. On New Years' Eve, he DMed Lauren on Instagram—production wouldn't give him her phone number—and asked if they could talk. He called her the next day. "As soon as I heard her voice," he tells me, "I knew that I had to end things with Becca." 
 
 Here, according to Arie, is how the breakup with Becca actually went down: 
 
 After talking to Lauren on New Years Day, he went to the Bachelor producers with his dilemma. That's when they pitched bringing in cameras to capture the breakup. If they filmed it, they told him, they could share that story with America, make sure that Bachelor Nation fully understood that he was being respectful and just following his heart. "'Then we can show you going back to Lauren, and people are going to rally behind you because you took this big risk and you did it for love,'" according to his telling. "'At the end of the day, people will just want to see you happy.'" In his head, it really was the only plausible option. 
 
 You've got to understand, he tells me, these people were my friends. He'd just spent months with the crew. He trusted them. But now? He feels "100 percent" betrayed. 
 
 Take the breakup with Becca, billed by the show as "the first completely unedited scene in reality television history." In the excruciating 40 minutes that aired, Becca repeatedly asks Arie to leave the house where—before he dumped her—they were supposed to be having a romantic getaway. Painfully, he sticks around, even knocking on the bathroom door as she cries to ask if she's okay. "OF COURSE SHE'S NOT OKAY!" I yelled at my TV when I watched the scene unfold. "YOU JUST BROKE OFF YOUR ENGAGEMENT!!!" 
 
 "It was completely edited," Arie says. "I was told to stay on that couch. I tried to leave, and then production was like, 'You need to go back inside. She's finally calming down. I feel like you owe it to her to have this conversation.' So then I went back in the house." 
 
 Really? You tried to leave and they wouldn't let you? 
 
 "Yeah. I left, came back. I stepped away from the couch, I went back to the couch." But they kept talking him into staying. "They cut out, obviously, production talking to me from 10 feet away," he says, and calling it unedited "was super unfair to me." (A spokesman for Warner Bros., which handles production for The Bachelor, declined to comment.) 
 
 That's one advantage of having hours and hours of tape. Over the course of the show, the producers and editors have so much footage to work with that they can essentially craft whatever narrative they choose. "There's no allegiance to what happened in reality," one former Bachelor editor told Amy Kaufman for the new book Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America's Favorite Guilty Pleasure. "I'm thinking, 'This is what I want to happen.' Then I make the footage tell that story." 
 
 The thing that's so striking about Arie's side of the story is that he understands where the producers and editors are coming from. He gets that he was there to make good TV. Even though he's disappointed with how the show was edited, he tells me that "there's still a lot of love" for the team that made him a detested household name. At one point, I'm third-wheeling the couple's dinner at Chelsea's Kitchen, one of Arie's favorite restaurants in Phoenix, and we're all having the short rib tacos (they're splitting one order, I order my own). If I was edited like that, I tell them, I'd be pissed. 
 
 Arie shrugs. "It's their job to make it entertaining for people." 
 
 What's harder for him to understand is why that's not obvious to the rest of America. 
 
 "Everyone makes me out to be the bad guy for filming it," he says of the breakup. But if he hadn't, he argues, Becca would have had to face uncomfortable questions about why they broke up on the show's after-finale special, After the Final Rose. Besides, he says, she wouldn't have been the next Bachelorette (which was announced the night of the finale), because "people wouldn't be able to cope with the fact that she just got broken up with on television." 
 
 So, he argues, why aren't more people thanking him? "I think if you look back at it now, it was positive for everyone. Everyone ended up getting closure and also an opportunity to be with the person that they were really meant to be with"—he with Lauren, and Becca with one of the twenty-odd suitors who will be vying for her affections come May 28. "I don't understand why I'm the fall guy for filming the breakup on a television show which we all signed up to be on." 
 
 They've seen 70 houses so far, but this might be the best. We're in a gorgeous modern farmhouse in a hip area of Phoenix with high, vaulted ceilings and huge windows. Lauren ventures into the master bedroom, and, from inside its depths, I hear a "Whaaaaaat!" She's found the cavernous walk-in closet. "Sold!" Arie jokes. They open the door to the two-car garage, and this time, it's his turn: "Hell, yeah!" (It's larger than my apartment in New York.) 
 
 Though the house is at the top of their budget, they're pretty sure this is the one. They wouldn't have to change much—put in a pool in the backyard, maybe. Lauren looks again at the closet. "Do you love that?" Arie asks her, poking fun at his widely mocked catchphrase from the show. ("After watching the show," he tells me, "I've completely changed my vocabulary.") We look at three more houses, but their hearts are set. By the end of the day, they've put an offer down, and the next day it's accepted. 
 
 "I agreed to do this because I believed it would be positive and shed light on who I am [and] in no way did I want to make Lauren upset. I think our interview is done." 
 
 Part of the reason they want to move out of Arie's condo, Lauren says, is because they're tired of their nosy neighbors ("It's not fun having pictures of you in your pajamas showing up on the internet"). Mostly, though, they just want to start their lives together. They plan to marry in Hawaii in January. They considered airing their nuptials as a television special, they told me, but ultimately decided against it. 
 
 After going to see their house two more times, we head to a nearby wine bar to celebrate. I need to write out some notes from the day, so I decide to go back to my Airbnb. The only thing is, I've been driving around with Arie and Lauren all day, and my rental car is parked back at his condo, which is 20 minutes away. No problem, he says. Why don't you take my truck? 
 
 It's not a big deal, he'll catch a ride back with his parents. I look out at his F-150, which, with the exception of a city bus, is the largest vehicle I've ever been in. I tell him I'll get an Uber. Well, did you leave your keys in my condo? he says. I'll give you my door code so you can get them. No thanks, I have them in my purse. I also... don't want to know how to get into Arie's house. 
 
 I'm a little taken aback by how trusting he is, how he's willing to hand over his door code and the keys to his enormous truck to a reporter he only met that morning. "I think what got him into trouble with The Bachelor," his dad tells me, "is he's just too honest in a way. Too open." 
 
 I was driving back to my Airbnb from Arie's condo when I get a text from him. I've just interviewed Lauren one-on-one, and it was a difficult conversation. I asked her about what it was like when Arie broke up with her ("I was just really confused"), her family's reaction to her taking him back ("My dad was a little concerned [at first] about him changing his mind again"), and whether she was hurt that he'd initially proposed to someone else ("People make mistakes, and he said he would spend the rest of his life making it up to me"). I also asked her about Becca's comment on the finale that she "would challenge him a lot more" than Lauren and that Becca—unlike Lauren—would "really want an equal partnership." 
 
 She and Arie didn't watch the finale, so this was the first she'd heard of the comment. 
 
 "It makes me feel a little upset that people don't think that I would be an equal partner with Arie," Lauren tells me. She owned her own business—a home staging company with her mom—and says she was the top sales representative at another company. Her dad was in the Navy, and she moved all around the country, making friends wherever she went. "I'm a very strong independent woman," she says. "Just because I had a little bit of a breakdown on the show, because I wasn't great in that environment, doesn't mean I'm not a strong person." As we wrapped up our interview, I could tell she was unsettled by the comment. We'd all planned to meet up at a karting track later that evening, so we hugged goodbye and I headed back to my Airbnb to change. 
 
 Then I got a text from Arie. 
 
 "I don't know how the conversation went on your end but Lauren is really upset," Arie wrote. "I agreed to do this because I believed it would be positive and shed light on who I am [and] in no way did I want to make Lauren upset. I think our interview is done." 
 
 In subsequent texts, he told me our time together felt like "a tabloid interview," and that he would have ABC reach out to my editor. I've come to really like Arie over my two days eating and house hunting with him in Scottsdale, so his unceremonious about-face catches me off-guard. He eventually refused to participate further in the story, canceling a planned photoshoot. Suffice it to say I did not receive a rose. 
 
 Maybe in a year or two or ten, Arie will recognize his role in the dumpster fire that was his season of The Bachelor. But he doesn't deserve the entirety of our outrage. Like so many Bachelor villains before him, he was engineered by the show, warped and edited to fit neatly into a role. With every new season, viewers demand more: more sobbing, more heartbreak, more shocking twists. That thirst for drama essentially demanded that, at some point, an Arie would emerge. Arie may be the most hated man in America, but we created him. ||||| Who is Arie Luyendyk Jr., really? Rebecca Nelson spent two days in Scottsdale with Arie and his fiancé Lauren to learn about who he really is and hear his side of The Bachelor's cringeworthy finale. 
 
 I'm on the back of Arie Luyendyk, Jr.'s new Harley, on what is essentially a date from The Bachelor. We're racing down the manicured streets of Scottsdale, Arizona, and I'm gripping his obliques with my forearms, hands clasped in front of him, because I don't want to fall off this hurtling death machine. Arie knows it's my first time on a motorcycle, so when he guns the engine, I look down at the speedometer in panic. (We're going 37.) He must have felt my muscles tense, because he pats my hands, which are now sweating, reassuringly. 
 
 "You're doing great!" he shouts over the din. 
 
 Approximately 17 hours later we arrive at our destination, an organic grocery/cafe that makes a great cappuccino (he's from Europe, so he knows a great cappuccino). His dad was a successful race car driver, winning the Indy 500 twice, and Arie followed in his tracks, starting his own racing career at 16. Our day so far—heart-pounding daytime activity, then an intimate meal to talk about DEEP STUFF—echoes one of the meticulously choreographed dates from the ABC reality series in which he recently starred. After a failed turn on a previous season of The Bachelorette, he served as the 22nd season's leading man, dating and dumping every one of the 29 tanned and bikini-ready women. Barely five minutes after we sit down, before I even have a chance to ask about it, he brings up the climax of what's widely considered the most dramatic season ever. 
 
 (A quick recap for non-Bachelor diehards: After saying "I love you" to two women in the "romantic sands, shores, and mountains" of Peru, he proposed to Becca Kufrin, a bubbly, 28-year-old publicist from Minnesota. Weeks later, he realized he'd made a terrible mistake—he actually belonged with the runner-up, Lauren Burnham, a reserved, 26-year-old saleswoman from Dallas. So he broke up with Becca, and, even though the season had ended and cameras were no longer required to document their every relationship move, he invited the Bachelor crew to film the breakup. Then he proposed to Lauren.) 
 
 In the days and weeks after the finale aired, he was digitally crucified on Twitter. Fans branded him the worst bachelor in franchise history (which, really, was quite an achievement). They called him cruel and heartless and a dirty rotten snake and said he should be ashamed of himself. One proactive Minnesota state lawmaker drafted a bill to ban Arie from the state. Even former cast members, who understand the behind-the-scenes of the show more than most, piled on. "I don't like this one bit," tweeted former bachelor Sean Lowe during the breakup scene. "Shouldn't have filmed." 
 
 Arie knew his actions would be "wildly unpopular," he tells me in between bites of an egg white omelet. Of course he knew. But he had to do it. He'd made the wrong decision, and his heart was elsewhere. What he can't understand is why more people don't see that he was just trying to do the right thing for everyone. Really, wasn't that the brave thing to do? To admit you made a mistake and follow your heart to make it right? 
 
 Even before he was on The Bachelor, Arie, who's 36, was a sucker for cheesy dating shows—90 Day Fiance, Married at First Sight, Dating Naked, the whole bit. He's also kind of a dork. One night at dinner with him and Lauren, he tells me his go-to karaoke song is The Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feeling," and proceeds to belt out a heartfelt rendition at the table ("you never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your liiiiiips / and there's nooooo tenderness like before in your fingertips"). "This is all being recorded, just so you know," Lauren reminds him. He keeps going. 
 
 Over the two days I spend in Arizona, Arie makes it clear that he's down to spend as much time with me as possible. He drives me around in his Ford F-150 Raptor, and let's me tag along while he and Lauren go house hunting. We eat multiple meals together. He even tries to convince me to hike nearby Camelback Mountain with them. (I politely decline.) It's not often that celebrities want to spend hours and hours with a reporter, especially after getting torn apart in countless thinkpieces. His unguarded nature is charming, in a way. It's easy to see how he was able to fall in love on national television three times. 
 
 Arie never thought he'd be on a reality show, let alone one of the genre's biggest villains. In 2011, when he was getting over a difficult breakup, he got drinks with a woman he used to date who'd become a producer for the Bachelor franchise. They'd cast a racecar driver for the upcoming season of The Bachelorette, she explained, and wanted to get his thoughts on the guy. Arie told her their suitor was a great dude. A month later, she called him up: The racecar driver couldn't do the show after all. Would Arie be interested in taking his spot? At 6-foot-2, with rakishly graying hair and a dorky hot dad vibe, he certainly fit the bill. The show started filming in five days, but he figured he didn't have anything to lose. Maybe he'd come back in one week, maybe ten. In any case, it seemed like it would be a fun vacation. 
 
 The other 24 contestants had been preparing for months. They'd meticulously planned their wardrobes, guzzled their green juices, lifted weights every day. "I was, like, the guy in the corner putting Nutella on French bread, making cappuccinos," he tells me with a laugh. Despite his lack of preparation, he made it to the final two suitors, but single mom Emily Maynard ultimately chose Jef (one f) Holm instead. Arie was gutted. 
 
 So he went back to his life in Scottsdale, racing and getting his real estate license and dating. Oh, he was dating. Multiple ex-girlfriends accused him of having "hoes in different area codes," including fellow Bachelor star Courtney Robertson, who wrote in her 2014 memoir that Arie was dating another woman the entire time they were together. (They've remained friends, and he rents her a condo just a few blocks from the restaurant where we're brunching.) In September, right before the news broke that he would be the next bachelor, ex-girlfriend Sydney Stempfley tweeted, like some kind of oracle, "The show would be perfect for @ariejr up until it comes to choosing just one." Arie denies any infidelity. Everyone has a past, he tells me. "What 36-year-old man hasn't dated around if they're single?" 
 
 ABC called him every year to see if he'd be on Bachelor in Paradise, or its predecessor, Bachelor Pad. He wasn't interested. But after years of dating around, he was ready to get serious. He desperately wants (two to four) kids—he loves kids, volunteers at the Phoenix Children's Hospital—and he was feeling lonely in his Scottsdale condo. When the producers floated the idea of him being the bachelor, it was an easy decision. 
 
 Everyone thinks he must be some reality TV ham, that he loves the spotlight. But that's not him at all, he says. He often gets overwhelmed by the attention, by fans who crowd him begging for selfies. When I ask Lauren to tell me a story that typifies Arie, she starts talking about his anxiety. At a race recently, a flock of girls recognized him and started calling his name. He panicked and took refuge in a trailer. It strikes me as an odd story to epitomize your fiancé, even if you've only known each other for a few months. 
 
 "As soon as I heard her voice, I knew I had to end things with Becca." 
 
 That first night at the Tuscan-style estate that's known in Bachelor parlance as "the mansion," Arie met the 29 women who'd be vying for his affections. Of the four women named Lauren, one stood out: Lauren B., a saleswoman from Texas. He'd actually met her before, at a race in Dallas earlier that year. Lauren, who'd been a fan of the show before trying out for the cast, recognized him at the race and asked for a picture. When she stepped out of the limo at the mansion to greet him, she brought the photo in a frame, but ABC cut it out of the season premiere. 
 
 On the show, viewers didn't see much of Arie and Lauren's relationship, or for that matter, much of Lauren's personality. One reporter even compiled every line of dialogue she had on the show in a brutally concise post. That, Arie tells me, was all part of the producers' storyline, and a product of selective editing. They painted her as the "pretty, quiet one," not the sweet, funny woman she actually is. It didn't help that she was cripplingly camera-shy, virtually shutting down in front of the crew. To make her feel more comfortable, Arie asked the producers to film their interactions from farther away, or from behind, so they wouldn't be as intrusive. It was during stolen moments, away from the cameras, that he says he fell for her. 
 
 But how could you know you were in love with someone if you only saw moments of her personality? 
 
 "I just kind of fell in love with her before I really knew who she was," Arie says. "I know that sounds kind of crazy, but I think there is that type of love out there where you just are blown away from the moment you meet somebody. That's kind of how it was with her." 
 
 Since the show wrapped, Arie and Lauren have grown inseparable. They road tripped from her parents' home in Virginia to Arizona, and they realized they're just so similar, Arie says. They have the same goofy sense of humor and love reciting lyrics to the same rap songs, like "Freaky Friday" by Lil Dicky and Chris Brown. In fact, they went out the other night and saw the rapper Ty Dolla $ign. They danced with him all night, broadcasting the bedlam in their Instagram stories. It wasn't until the next morning that they realized it wasn't actually Ty Dolla $ign. "We laughed so hard," he says. "I don't know. It's kind of hard to talk about our relationship and encompass it to make it easy for people to understand." 
 
 His dad, Arie Sr., says he's never seen his son in love like this before. "It's like there's one person, almost, between the two of them," he says. "They're so connected." 
 
 Off camera, Arie says he and Lauren did have substantive conversations: about her family, her prior engagement, how she dreams of getting into medical sales. With her, he never needed to subtly touch his eyebrow, his signal for the producers to get him out of a conversation with someone he wasn't feeling. Lauren was around for much of my time in Scottsdale, and she was far more personable than the show depicted. She spoke a normal amount, asking me thoughtful questions about other people I've written about and where I'm from. She seemed eager to hang out, suggesting we go to a spa ("People love spas here!") or maybe get tickets to Cavalia, a Cirque du Soleil-like show with horses. (We didn't do either.) 
 
 She wasn't working yet, but planned to go to real estate school so she and Arie could go into business together. In the meantime, she was going to barre class and getting her nails done and poring over wedding magazines. Not that she needed much dress inspo: Arie, she tells me, already had an idea of what he wanted her to wear on their big day. "He just pictures something delicate, with straps, and form-fitted, and long," Lauren says. He tends to remember critical moments in their relationship by what she was wearing, like when he dreamily recalls that she was "wearing all white" on the night of their first kiss. 
 
 By the time Lauren donned an off-white beaded gown for the proposal day in November, she hadn't opened up as much as Arie had hoped. At least not as much as Becca, who "was so herself, on and off camera," he says. He needed more time—he asked for more time—but the day after his final date with Becca was decision day. "My date with Becca ended at three in the morning, and then production woke me up at seven in the morning, and they were like, 'Okay, who is it?'" Even the morning he proposed, he was feeling conflicted. But there was a production schedule to adhere to—there were all the cameras, the crew, all the people who had flown down to Peru. The whole point of the show, what he'd hoped for at the outset, was an engagement. That 3-carat Neil Lane ring was burning a hole in his pocket. 
 
 So he proposed to Becca. 
 
 "I felt like I was trying to be logical. I tried to think like, 'Okay, I know who Becca is, and she's a great person," he tells me over brunch. "In the moment, I felt like I was making the right choice." 
 
 But he was haunted by the thought that he'd let his soulmate slip away. On New Years' Eve, he DMed Lauren on Instagram—production wouldn't give him her phone number—and asked if they could talk. He called her the next day. "As soon as I heard her voice," he tells me, "I knew that I had to end things with Becca." 
 
 Here, according to Arie, is how the breakup with Becca actually went down: 
 
 After talking to Lauren on New Years Day, he went to the Bachelor producers with his dilemma. That's when they pitched bringing in cameras to capture the breakup. If they filmed it, they told him, they could share that story with America, make sure that Bachelor Nation fully understood that he was being respectful and just following his heart. "'Then we can show you going back to Lauren, and people are going to rally behind you because you took this big risk and you did it for love,'" according to his telling. "'At the end of the day, people will just want to see you happy.'" In his head, it really was the only plausible option. 
 
 You've got to understand, he tells me, these people were my friends. He'd just spent months with the crew. He trusted them. But now? He feels "100 percent" betrayed. 
 
 Take the breakup with Becca, billed by the show as "the first completely unedited scene in reality television history." In the excruciating 40 minutes that aired, Becca repeatedly asks Arie to leave the house where—before he dumped her—they were supposed to be having a romantic getaway. Painfully, he sticks around, even knocking on the bathroom door as she cries to ask if she's okay. "OF COURSE SHE'S NOT OKAY!" I yelled at my TV when I watched the scene unfold. "YOU JUST BROKE OFF YOUR ENGAGEMENT!!!" 
 
 "It was completely edited," Arie says. "I was told to stay on that couch. I tried to leave, and then production was like, 'You need to go back inside. She's finally calming down. I feel like you owe it to her to have this conversation.' So then I went back in the house." 
 
 Really? You tried to leave and they wouldn't let you? 
 
 "Yeah. I left, came back. I stepped away from the couch, I went back to the couch." But they kept talking him into staying. "They cut out, obviously, production talking to me from 10 feet away," he says, and calling it unedited "was super unfair to me." (A spokesman for Warner Bros., which handles production for The Bachelor, declined to comment.) 
 
 That's one advantage of having hours and hours of tape. Over the course of the show, the producers and editors have so much footage to work with that they can essentially craft whatever narrative they choose. "There's no allegiance to what happened in reality," one former Bachelor editor told Amy Kaufman for the new book Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America's Favorite Guilty Pleasure. "I'm thinking, 'This is what I want to happen.' Then I make the footage tell that story." 
 
 The thing that's so striking about Arie's side of the story is that he understands where the producers and editors are coming from. He gets that he was there to make good TV. Even though he's disappointed with how the show was edited, he tells me that "there's still a lot of love" for the team that made him a detested household name. At one point, I'm third-wheeling the couple's dinner at Chelsea's Kitchen, one of Arie's favorite restaurants in Phoenix, and we're all having the short rib tacos (they're splitting one order, I order my own). If I was edited like that, I tell them, I'd be pissed. 
 
 Arie shrugs. "It's their job to make it entertaining for people." 
 
 What's harder for him to understand is why that's not obvious to the rest of America. 
 
 "Everyone makes me out to be the bad guy for filming it," he says of the breakup. But if he hadn't, he argues, Becca would have had to face uncomfortable questions about why they broke up on the show's after-finale special, After the Final Rose. Besides, he says, she wouldn't have been the next Bachelorette (which was announced the night of the finale), because "people wouldn't be able to cope with the fact that she just got broken up with on television." 
 
 So, he argues, why aren't more people thanking him? "I think if you look back at it now, it was positive for everyone. Everyone ended up getting closure and also an opportunity to be with the person that they were really meant to be with"—he with Lauren, and Becca with one of the twenty-odd suitors who will be vying for her affections come May 28. "I don't understand why I'm the fall guy for filming the breakup on a television show which we all signed up to be on." 
 
 They've seen 70 houses so far, but this might be the best. We're in a gorgeous modern farmhouse in a hip area of Phoenix with high, vaulted ceilings and huge windows. Lauren ventures into the master bedroom, and, from inside its depths, I hear a "Whaaaaaat!" She's found the cavernous walk-in closet. "Sold!" Arie jokes. They open the door to the two-car garage, and this time, it's his turn: "Hell, yeah!" (It's larger than my apartment in New York.) 
 
 Though the house is at the top of their budget, they're pretty sure this is the one. They wouldn't have to change much—put in a pool in the backyard, maybe. Lauren looks again at the closet. "Do you love that?" Arie asks her, poking fun at his widely mocked catchphrase from the show. ("After watching the show," he tells me, "I've completely changed my vocabulary.") We look at three more houses, but their hearts are set. By the end of the day, they've put an offer down, and the next day it's accepted. 
 
 "I agreed to do this because I believed it would be positive and shed light on who I am [and] in no way did I want to make Lauren upset. I think our interview is done." 
 
 Part of the reason they want to move out of Arie's condo, Lauren says, is because they're tired of their nosy neighbors ("It's not fun having pictures of you in your pajamas showing up on the internet"). Mostly, though, they just want to start their lives together. They plan to marry in Hawaii in January. They considered airing their nuptials as a television special, they told me, but ultimately decided against it. 
 
 After going to see their house two more times, we head to a nearby wine bar to celebrate. I need to write out some notes from the day, so I decide to go back to my Airbnb. The only thing is, I've been driving around with Arie and Lauren all day, and my rental car is parked back at his condo, which is 20 minutes away. No problem, he says. Why don't you take my truck? 
 
 It's not a big deal, he'll catch a ride back with his parents. I look out at his F-150, which, with the exception of a city bus, is the largest vehicle I've ever been in. I tell him I'll get an Uber. Well, did you leave your keys in my condo? he says. I'll give you my door code so you can get them. No thanks, I have them in my purse. I also... don't want to know how to get into Arie's house. 
 
 I'm a little taken aback by how trusting he is, how he's willing to hand over his door code and the keys to his enormous truck to a reporter he only met that morning. "I think what got him into trouble with The Bachelor," his dad tells me, "is he's just too honest in a way. Too open." 
 
 I was driving back to my Airbnb from Arie's condo when I get a text from him. I've just interviewed Lauren one-on-one, and it was a difficult conversation. I asked her about what it was like when Arie broke up with her ("I was just really confused"), her family's reaction to her taking him back ("My dad was a little concerned [at first] about him changing his mind again"), and whether she was hurt that he'd initially proposed to someone else ("People make mistakes, and he said he would spend the rest of his life making it up to me"). I also asked her about Becca's comment on the finale that she "would challenge him a lot more" than Lauren and that Becca—unlike Lauren—would "really want an equal partnership." 
 
 She and Arie didn't watch the finale, so this was the first she'd heard of the comment. 
 
 "It makes me feel a little upset that people don't think that I would be an equal partner with Arie," Lauren tells me. She owned her own business—a home staging company with her mom—and says she was the top sales representative at another company. Her dad was in the Navy, and she moved all around the country, making friends wherever she went. "I'm a very strong independent woman," she says. "Just because I had a little bit of a breakdown on the show, because I wasn't great in that environment, doesn't mean I'm not a strong person." As we wrapped up our interview, I could tell she was unsettled by the comment. We'd all planned to meet up at a karting track later that evening, so we hugged goodbye and I headed back to my Airbnb to change. 
 
 Then I got a text from Arie. 
 
 "I don't know how the conversation went on your end but Lauren is really upset," Arie wrote. "I agreed to do this because I believed it would be positive and shed light on who I am [and] in no way did I want to make Lauren upset. I think our interview is done." 
 
 In subsequent texts, he told me our time together felt like "a tabloid interview," and that he would have ABC reach out to my editor. I've come to really like Arie over my two days eating and house hunting with him in Scottsdale, so his unceremonious about-face catches me off-guard. He eventually refused to participate further in the story, canceling a planned photoshoot. Suffice it to say I did not receive a rose. 
 
 Maybe in a year or two or ten, Arie will recognize his role in the dumpster fire that was his season of The Bachelor. But he doesn't deserve the entirety of our outrage. Like so many Bachelor villains before him, he was engineered by the show, warped and edited to fit neatly into a role. With every new season, viewers demand more: more sobbing, more heartbreak, more shocking twists. That thirst for drama essentially demanded that, at some point, an Arie would emerge. Arie may be the most hated man in America, but we created him.
– It took some time for the din from March's Bachelor finale—after Arie Luyendyk Jr. dumped the girl he initially chose, Becca Kufrin, and got engaged to runner-up Lauren Burnham—to subside. Now, however, thanks to Kufrin's stint as the current Bachelorette and a new profile on Luyendyk in GQ, "the most hated bachelor in America" is back in the spotlight. Rebecca Nelson spent two days in Scottsdale, Ariz., with the 36-year-old and Burnham, a "reserved" 26-year-old, and Luyendyk insists he was made into a villain by the crew and feels "100%" betrayed. He's especially irked about the supposedly unedited footage of his breakup with Kufrin, which he says was more staged than suggested. Viewers had raged that Luyendyk wouldn't leave after Kufrin told him to. "It was completely edited," he says. "I was told to stay on that couch. I tried to leave, and then production was like, 'You need to go back inside.'" Still, Luyendyk understands the producers' role ("it's their job to make it entertaining for people"), and the rest of Nelson's stay involved tagging along with the couple as they went house hunting, hearing about how Luyendyk ended up on the show in the first place in 2011—he was a fill-in for a last-minute dropout—and learning about Luyendyk's thought process as he struggled to choose between two women. Nelson's visit with the couple didn't end on a great note: After a one-on-one with Burnham in which Nelson revealed to Burnham (who hadn't watched the finale) about a comment Kufrin had made about how she'd "challenge [Luyendyk] a lot more" than Burnham, Nelson got a text from Luyendyk. "I don't know how the conversation went on your end but Lauren is really upset," he wrote. "I think our interview is done." (Read the full story here.)