We Had Tea With Runner-Up Abbie Chatfield To Debrief On Life After ‘The Bachelor’
We meet this year’s Bachelor runner-up Abbie Chatfield at Single O in Sydney’s Surry Hills. When she arrives, Co-Star tells me, “You could write a love poem to yourself,” and the noted Gemini gushes about how she loves that particular cursed astrology app.
Abbie is warm and chatty as she shares her future plans – she’ll probably move to Sydney in the new year, and go back to uni for the spring semester.
After spending the weekend with a friend in Sydney, where she met Paradise player Nathan Favro at a Bondi Boost event (they’re not together), she’s going down to Melbourne, where she’ll be met with the inevitable tabloid splash: ‘Is Abbie In Melbourne To See The Newly Single Matt Agnew?”
As we talk, about travelling alone through Scotland, about her exes, about what it means to become gossip fodder, Abbie is unapologetically comfortable with herself. She would have to be after spending much of this year as the undeserving subject of an Australia-wide slut-shaming effort, at the same time as she was trying to grieve the end of an incredibly public TV relationship.
Here’s what we learned having tea with the iconic Abbie Chatfield:
She took a 27-hour trip to South Africa to get dumped
To avoid paparazzi, Abbie was flown 14 hours from Sydney to Dubai for the final episode. After a nine-hour layover, she was flown to Johannesburg in South Africa, and then driven three-and-a-half hours to the finale location. Going back the same way after being dumped, she cried the whole way home. “I didn’t cry for a bit after that because I think I was all cried out about Matt for a little while, then it all came back.”
While in South Africa, she wasn’t allowed to open the curtains – again for fear of paparazzi spoiling the show. Her minder literally described to her a herd of elephants going by her window. Then, when she came back from being brutally dropped on camera, she returned to her room to find that baboons had broken in and raided the fridge.
“While we were filming the finale, baboons came into our room and ate all the food in our fridge. And that was the first time that I’d laughed, it was so fuckin’ funny. Like, what is my life?”
Getting over her Bachelor heartbreak took about five months
After the finale, Abbie found herself searching Dr. Matt’s media appearances for clues about how he felt about her. “I’d watch all the interviews if I was mentioned. I would watch his facial expression, to see if he hates me or he doesn’t hate me.” But the astrophysicist gave nothing away.
That’s about five months in total to fully process the loss – a timeline that was prolonged by public scrutiny of her personally, and of what she had with Dr. Matt. “I’m getting abusive messages: ‘You never cared about Matt, you’re a fucking bitch, it’s so clear you don’t even like him, you just wanna win.’ This is four months later and I’m still crying myself to sleep about this man. It did make it hard because there was this vast difference in how everyone was perceiving me and my emotions and what the reality of it was.”
By the time the show started airing, three months after filming finished, Abbie felt like she was over Matt. But about halfway through watching the season she realised, “Oh shit, I still have feelings”: “I was crying about it again and it all kinda came back ’til maybe two weeks after the finale aired.”
She stresses that the reason it seemed to take so long to grieve is that she didn’t get the kind of closure you can get from real-world relationships. “You leave the rock in Africa you got fuckin’ dumped on and then you’re like I don’t talk to you ever again.
“Usually in a breakup, I’m like, ‘Can I call you?’ four days later, ‘Can we just like talk about this?’ I could never do that. It was like, everything was perfect and then the next morning it wasn’t.”
Abbie is blunt when asked how she got over her TV ex: “I just went on like a dick spree.” Scared to see everyone she knew at home in Brissie, she came down to Sydney and went out a lot, adopting a fake name because no one was allowed to know she was single. “I slept with a few British people, so they wouldn’t know who I was. And my name was Annabel, because it had to be an A-name because of my A-necklace.”
Abbie Chatfield finally knew for certain she was over Matt when she was able to say ‘I love you’ to another man. She had finally stopped caring. “I stopped checking Matt and Chelsie’s Instagrams and wondering how they were going. I stopped rewatching my dates on YouTube.”
But there have been one or two times where she’s felt that ‘pang’ of heartbreak since when something reminded her of Matt. She laughs, “We didn’t have much content to go on, I guess. It was only three months so [the breakup] wasn’t as severe as other relationships that I’ve had.”
At the Bondi Boost event she saw the boat on which she first said ‘I love you,’ to Matt on their last date in Australia. “I got a bit of a pang then. I was like, ‘Oooh, that’s that boat.'”
She believes the public perceived her as a ‘man stealer’
Abbie notes the character archetypes she and her Chelsie fell into – shortcuts used to give the show a clear narrative, that dismisses the reality that every woman on the series is multi-faceted. “Insecurity is seen as a positive thing in women and being confident is a negative thing,” she begins. “Insecurity shouldn’t make someone attractive.
“I’m not being like, I’m the fuckin’ hottest thing in the world. But I’m happy with how I look and it’s taken me years to get to this place. From being 15 and eating one apple in an entire day, running nine kilometres every day with ankle weights on, I’m finally happy with my body.”
Audiences perceived her as a kind of ‘man stealer’, she says. “I have blonde, curly hair with big tits and blue eyes, and I laugh at shit, I laugh at dumb things, I make sexual comments, and I’m like a playboy in their mind. They see me as the high school bitch who stole their boyfriend. How can you be a ‘man stealer’ in the situation where the point of this show is to make the man love you?”
She was the so-called “cocky bitch” of the series, a counterpoint to winner Chelsie, who was reduced to this “insecure meek little thing” that she isn’t. It plays into cultural ideas around a male ‘saviour’ complex, that “you need a man to fix you”.
In the wake of a horrible breakup last year, Abbie resolved not to let herself “rely on a man to make [her] happy”. “You should be a whole person yourself before you get with someone else. Like RuPaul says: ‘If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?'”
Thanks to her experience on The Bachelor, Abbie also realised that her feelings of unworthiness after her bad breakup were unfounded. “Matt was an extraordinary person, and we had an amazing connection. I think that added to my self-worth a little bit, realising that there are normal men out there.”
Abbie Chatfield ended up with a platform to help other people struggling to feel less alone
To protect herself from the negativity of people online during the season, a friend took over her Instagram, monitoring messages and comments. Still, there were times where she got sucked into Googling her own name to see what people were saying about it. “It got to a point where I was like, ‘This isn’t helping anyone. The articles are out there, the comments are out there. You can’t do anything about it, so I’ve gotta focus on my real life.’
“I hung out with my friends more and put my phone away and just tried to do things I enjoy. I tried to go to the beach and travel a bit more and see my friends who are in different cities and focus on things that weren’t based around the show.”
While the show was airing, Abbie would’ve said that given her time over, she would not have done The Bachelor. But now, with the benefit of a few months distance, she says it was worth it. What she learned from her experience is that people are “gonna hate you no matter what you do”, so fuck it, do what you want.
“Before I went into this, I was very scared of what everyone thought of me… I’ve learned that all I need to care about is making myself happy and the people that I care about happy.”
Going into the series she thought that even if she didn’t get the guy, the experience might give her a platform to talk about social issues that are important to her – around fat-shaming, slut-shaming and even abortion.
“I’ve been able to do that. When I chose to speak about my abortion, I really just wanted people to feel like it was OK if they had an abortion as well, because I didn’t feel like it was OK for ages, because no one talks about it.
“If these are controversial topics people are gonna hate someone for, they may as well keep hating me, and then maybe one person will feel a bit better about being fat-shamed or having an abortion or being slut-shamed.”
Now Abbie Chatfield gets messages from fans saying, “‘I used to hate you, and now I really like you.” After spending the season being accused of being dumb or having no interests, she’s since been able to use Instagram to talk about those issues and reveal herself as something more than a ‘villain’. The haters were proven wrong. “It was really satisfying and really good being able to just be myself, and I think that’s why people responded to me so well.
“People have had this incredible bounceback, and I think they have realised that I’m not who they thought I was on the show, and maybe that’s more interesting. Everyone loves a redemption story.”