From one Bachelor to another: Why Nick Cummins made the right call

LAST year’s Bachelor Matty J has spilt on what it’s really like to be the one making the big decisions — and why last night’s shocking finale could have been “a lot worse”.

WE’RE all still reeling from the fact that Nick “Honey Badger” Cummins decided to dump both finalists on The Bachelor in favour of staying single.

It was gobsmacking — and simply not the fairytale we all feel we’re owed in the finale.

It’s hard to imagine going through such a huge process and deciding to just give up at the final hurdle. Hell, even Blake Garvey, our most infamous Bachelor, delivered the dream ending and gave it a (brief) shot with Sam Frost.

But, from one of the very few people who actually know what it’s like in Nick’s shoes, he made the right decision.

Speaking to news.com.au, 2017 Bachie Matty Johnson, who’s still happily dating winner Laura Byrne, explained that if Nick wasn’t 100 per cent invested, he needed to get out when he did.

“What people need to realise is that there really is no ‘halfway’ of doing the show,” Matty said.

“You can’t really just dip your toe in. You’re either all in, or you’re not, and I think for Nick to have picked one of the girls and said like, ‘Hey, let’s just see how this goes and give this a little crack,’ it would have been a lot worse.”

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Matty added there’s a lot of pressure from fans because “everyone wants those fireworks”.

“To come out of (the show) and be like, ‘Look, we’re kind of just seeing how things are going, and I haven’t said I love you yet because I’m not quite sure …’ Honestly, it’s almost easier to just completely pull away and not even enter a half-hearted relationship.”

While plenty of fans are furious at Nick over his treatment of finalists Sophie Tieman and Brittany Hockley, Matty admitted that he feels sorry for his Bachelor heir, who fled to Papua New Guinea earlier this week — presumably to escape the media glare.

“It sucks that he didn’t get to fall in love, and at the end of the day, he made the right call for himself, which is what you have to do in that situation,” he said.

“It’s a really sh*t situation. No one wins, and he’s not even in the country to give people some insight into what he was thinking, so all we can do is get our pitchforks and scream and shout at him, which is a shame.”

As viewers watched Nick dump not one, but two women in the nailbiting finale, plenty of us — especially those who’ve watched UnREAL — couldn’t help but wonder just how much the show’s producers were freaking out behind the scenes.

Could have sworn I heard someone shouting “JUST PICK ONE, FFS!” in the background.

But according to Matty, the crew actually float the idea of picking no one from the very beginning of filming.

“They’d be like, ‘Hey, you don’t have to pick anyone if you don’t want to, that’s an option for you, just so you’re aware’,” he told news.com.au.

“It surprised me. You’d think they’d be like, ‘There needs to be a result’, but they’d keep telling me, ‘Just remember this is all about you. The most important thing here is what’s right for you in your situation, don’t try and appease anybody else … There’s no wrong decision you can make, whether you pick A or B or no one at all, what’s most important is that you’re happy.’”

It makes sense then, that Nick was probably afforded the same option — and chose to take it. With the question still remaining as to why someone who clearly wasn’t ready to settle down was ever chosen to be the Bachelor, Matty explained that the casting process is actually “pretty fluid and loose”.

“It wasn’t as if they sat me down and said, ‘When do you want to have kids, and when do you want to be married?’” he said.

“They asked me things like, ‘What’s your five-year plan, where would you like to be and what would you like to be doing?’ And at all times, you’re saying to them, ‘I’m ready for this.’”

Producers also discuss with the potential Bachelor all the ways their season could play out, warning them that there’s no guarantee of a fairytale ending.

“You talk about all the different scenarios and how it could end, and they say to you at that point that, while you have people like (season one’s Tim Robards and Anna Heinrich and season two’s Sam Woods and Snezana Markoski), if you don’t get that … it’s not your fault.”