The 27-year-old reality star addresses his split for the first time to ET.
Dean Unglert is opening up about his split from Lesley Murphy.
ET's Lauren Zima sat down with the Bachelor Winter Games star for Tuesday's episode of Roses and Rose Live, where he addressed his recent breakup for the first time, and revealed what went wrong.
"Lesley's a great girl. It's just one of those things where it's sometimes two people aren't meant to be together and I think... neither of us wanted to drag it on longer than we had to," Unglert revealed. "Like, if this isn't your forever person, then you should kind of nip it in the bud and four months to end a relationship is better than 12 months, if it's not going to marriage and kids and all that kind of stuff."
Unglert and Murphy became a fan-favorite couple on Bachelor Winter Games, which filmed in December and aired in February. Unglert gave Murphy a key to his place on the show's finale, but the two called it quits in April. According to Unglert, his breakup with Murphy didn't have a lot to do with the Bachelor bubble bursting after the show. "It was just a matter of opinion, just as people," he explained.
The two don't talk now, but they're still amicable. In fact, Unglert said he and Murphy -- who now lives in Los Angeles -- ran into each other at a wedding a few weeks ago. "There wasn't bad blood or anything like that, which is great," he shared.
And while the relationship didn't work out, Unglert views the breakup as a learning experience, and takes the blame for what went wrong. "I do have a lot of growth to do. Not that age is an excuse, I'm 27. I think that I still have a lot of discovery to do in myself before I'm really ready for something like that, and that's a hard thing to come to terms with," he said. "You think you're ready for a relationship at a time in your life, and you slowly begin to realize you're not nearly as ready as you thought."
"I've always thought that no matter if you're ready or not, if the right person comes along, then that's when you'll be ready, but I think you need to kind of be at 100 percent before you're ready to welcome another person in," he added.
That's just one of the things Unglert has learned since his split from Murphy. The former reality star, who said he won't be going back to Bachelor in Paradise, and won't appear on any more Bachelor franchise shows, has been taking time for himself and going to therapy.
"I've been reading, meditating, the therapy has been helpful because I've never really had, like, an unbiased resource to go and talk to, 'Hey, what do you think of this? How should I react to this? Why does my brain work this way?'" he said.
And Unglert gets plenty of advice on his podcast, Help! I Suck at Dating With Dean Unglert. "I still suck at dating," joked Unglert, who is currently single. "There was a brief instance where I didn't suck at dating for a while and now I suck again."
"It's just not really fair for me to bring someone into a relationship when I'm still uncertain of what I need to be in a happy relationship," he said. "We'll see what happens."
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