Ariel Frenkel shared her feelings about being left out of the loop on the Fantasy Suite drama.
It turned out to be the most talked-about moment on Season 27 of “The Bachelor.” Zach Shallcross prepared to set out on a trio of Fantasy Suite dates with the final three woman in the competition and then fumbled the highly anticipated encounters by making a vow no one asked him to make—and immediately breaking it.
As he explained to Ariel Frenkel on his first date, he had no intention of having sex on any of his dates. He told Gabi Elnicki the same thing on the second date, but he followed it up a little differently by having with her. Then, guilt-stricken, he recapped it all in a messy confession on date three with Kaity Biggar.
After it was all over, Shallcross sent Frenkel home, the one woman who had no idea about his sexual change of heart. And that became the topic of an uncomfortable confrontation on the opening portion of the live “Bachelor” finale Monday night.
Frenkel and Shallcross came face-to-face, and their talk started with Frenkel opening up about how she felt in the wake of everything that happened.
“It was really difficult to see you weren’t honest with me,” she told him in a calm and controlled tone. “I committed to being in an open relationship, that’s what it is and what I want to call it. When the parameters of an open relationship change, I should be the first to know. I should have not been left in the dark, standing up there in Thailand at the Rose Ceremony. You had ample time to also tell me about everything before I left.”
Ariel Frenkel shared her feelings about being left out of the loop about all the Fantasy Suite … [+]
Before Shallcross joined her on stage, Frankel explained to host Jesse Palmer that she didn’t learn about any of what happened until fans of the series did, during last week’s penultimate episode. It felt like a betrayal to the 28-year-old marketing executive.
“So I just really want to know why the other women were given grace and honesty, and that’s something you really pride yourself on, and why I wasn’t given that same respect?” she asked her former flame.
Shallcross, 26, nodded as she spoke (and as the live audience cheered her on), and responded by saying, “Looking back on all of that, I absolutely look back with regret at how I handled a lot of that week. You know, to be fully honest, I was going through a lot mentally, and I didn’t know the right way to handle everything, as we all saw. My actions in setting those parameters for the week were not the right way to go about it. And you’re right, I should have told you, probably first.”
He admitted he owed her an apology for not keeping her in the Fantasy Suite loop, and said, “That’s on me. There’s no excuse for it.”
Zach Shallcross and Ariel Frenkel seemed to have great chemistry on their pre-Fantasy Suite date.
Frenkel pointed out that the problem began before anyone had sex with anyone else.
“By putting sex off the table, you made the entire week about sex,” she said.
Host Palmer asked the tech exec from Anaheim Hills, California if he regretted that choice, to which Shallcross quickly replied, “Absolutely!” before throwing in another “sorry” for Frenkel.
However, it wasn’t about apologies for her. It was about being heard, and he never gave her the chance to voice an opinion on any of it, since he simply told her his rules before their final date.
The confrontation between Ariel Frankel and Zach Shallcross got heavy at times.
“I appreciate you apologizing, but I want you to understand that you took away my agency that night in that conversation,” Frenkel noted. “When you come to all the women with a universal opinion on what should happen, we’re no longer a couple, we’re not talking as a couple, coming to a conclusion as a couple. So you took away my agency, and you took away my ability to even have a conversation. And if you had waited, you would have found out that I was on the same page as you.”
A contrite Shallcross nodded more while repeating, “You’re right,” while the audience erupted in applause again.
Despite the direction of the at-times tense conversation, it didn’t end tensely.
Instead Frenkel redirected to the part of her “Bachelor” experience that made a real difference in her life.
“I don’t want to reduce our entire relationship to that final week,” she said. “I still look back on our relationship fondly. You let me open up in ways that I haven’t in so long, and now I’m kind of ready to be in a new relationship and to put myself out there again.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/reehines/2023/03/27/ariel-frenkel-confronts-zach-shallcross-about-fantasy-suite-betrayal-on-bachelor-finale/