ET spoke with the former Bachelorette about her new memoir, 'God Bless This Mess.'
Hannah Brown and Tyler Cameron have been through a lot together. The pair first met on Hannah's season of The Bachelorette in 2019, and have had a much-discussed friendship in the years since. Hannah details their journey together in her memoir, God Bless This Mess, which ET spoke to her about ahead of its release.
Hannah's season of The Bachelorette ended with her getting engaged to Jed Wyatt, but they quickly broke up after it came out that he had a girlfriend when he came on the show.
While feelings for Jed didn't linger, the same can't be said about Tyler. Fans were delighted when Hannah asked Tyler out for a drink during the After the Final Rose special, but what they didn't know was the pair had already been chatting before the reunion special. Hannah, she writes, had come to believe that Tyler was the guy she was "supposed to be with."
"I still had feelings for him. Then, of course, with everything that happened with Jed and the really early signs that things weren't going great, I think I always kind of was like, 'Ugh, dang it. Maybe I made the wrong decision and didn't have enough time,'" Hannah told ET. "A few weeks before After The Final Rose, I asked if I could talk to him and was very honest about how I felt, was wondering if he felt anything still... I wouldn't have asked him on national television for the first time, to go out, if I hadn't had previous conversations before that."
As was planned, Tyler accepted Hannah's invitation for a drink. Soon after, she invited him to her apartment so they could speak privately. Hannah writes that the night was "awkward" at the start, but notes that, eventually, they opened up about their remaining feelings for each other and kissed... just kissed.
When Tyler went to leave the next morning, paparazzi snapped photos of him and Hannah saying goodbye to each other, but the pair "laughed it off," she writes.
Two days later, Tyler called Hannah to confirm that they were not exclusive. She expressed that she had wanted to date only him, but he got off the phone quickly with promises to call her back. The next morning, photos of Tyler out with Gigi Hadid surfaced.
"That was really hard," Hannah told ET. "The show didn't go like I anticipated it going... Then I was really hoping there was still a chance I could get a happy ending and something might come out of it. I just felt like both my knees kind of got knocked out from under me. I think I was really embarrassed. Just my ego was like, 'Oh man, this sucks.'"
"I always say, 'If I had the chance to date Gigi Hadid, I'd probably do it too,'" she joked. "It was all just really hard from my side of things, having to navigate being in the public eye and really not knowing what happened was hard."
The pair went their separate ways for a while after that, but Hannah got back in touch when Tyler's mom died. Hannah was going through a hard time, too, as her brother had recently overdosed.
Hannah later attended Tyler's mother's celebration of life, and he floated the idea of quarantining together amid the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. She agreed, thinking she'd be there a few days, but she ended up staying almost a month.
Tyler and Hannah, who were also quarantining with Matt James and others, documented the experience on social media, and the flirty posts made fans think they were rekindling their romance. In actuality, though, the whole thing was shrouded in confusion.
"It was weird, because, for me, it was going from being flirty and then not talking for a whole day while we're living together," Hannah told ET of quarantining with Tyler. "I think it was obviously a hard time for a lot of people and especially for Tyler and his family during that time... I still can't imagine how that felt and where he was in that time."
"I think, for me, it was really difficult because it's not my home field. I only know people through this guy that I was on a TV show with. There were obviously feelings towards [him] and it just felt like whiplash. All the time," she continued. "... It was a lot."
Hannah told ET she "wasn't in a good place" at the time, and the same could be said for Tyler, who "was going through the loss of his mom." On top of all of that, the public was speculating non-stop about their relationship, which added to "the pressure" of the situation.
"I always say, 'Thank goodness I had Matt James there.' We became really great friends during that time," Hannah told ET. "There was still some really fun times, but it wasn't what it always looked like on the outside."
Hannah eventually figured out how to get back to Alabama, and, besides a text from Tyler making sure she made it home safely, she didn't hear from him for a week. While the pair tried to maintain their friendship, even making a YouTube video about their time in quarantine, Hannah writes that it "just got so weird."
Eventually, she decided to tell Tyler that she "couldn’t really be friends with him anymore."
"'It just hurts me too much,' I said. 'I just need some space. Maybe down the line we can try it again.' That happened about six months before I sat down to write this page in my book -- and I haven’t heard from him since," she writes. "His last poetic words to me were, 'Well... if you rock with me, you rock with me. If you don’t, you don’t.' I wish I was making that up."
Hannah told ET that the text from Tyler was "one of our final conversations," though he is aware of the book and has read bits and pieces of it.
"I was like, 'Look, I'm talking about this. This was a part of my life and it's a part of our relationship,'" she said. "He's seen some of it, but I've been working on this for a long time, so he definitely hasn't seen the final edits of it all."
As for her feelings toward him today, Hannah told ET that she and Tyler "respect each other and the relationship that we've had, but, at the same time, I think we're both just going different directions and maybe want different things at this time in life."
"I think there's just a lot of miscommunication," she said. "We haven't spoken since I wrote that, but I think we're not, like, hostile with each other. I am rooting for him and I think he's rooting for me too."
ET has reached out to Tyler's rep for comment.
Tyler split from his most recent girlfriend, Camila Kendra, in August, while Hannah is currently dating model Adam Woolard.
God Bless This Mess is now available.
RELATED CONTENT:
