The 'Bachelorette' couple has been engaged for five months.
Tayshia Adams and Zac Clark aren't rushing down the aisle just yet. Viewers of The Bachelorette saw Adams and her fiancé get engaged on the December finale of the show, but Tayshia tells Marie Claire that she's still dating her husband-to-be.
"We’re dating right now while being engaged," she says, adding that she's "not at all" thinking about ending the relationship.
"At first, Zac was the person to be like, 'We could get married next week.' And I was like, 'Slow your roll. I’d love to date a year,'" Tayshia, 30, says. "And now I’m like, 'You want to … maybe next month?' And he’s like, 'Tayshia, slow your roll.' We’re back and forth. But there’s no timeline. It’s definitely going to happen. I just don’t know when."
While their wedding isn't a focus right now, Tayshia and Zac, whose engagement took place five months ago, moved in together in New York two months after committing to saying "I do."
"It’s not a normal relationship," she admits of the quick engagement. "We do bicker and fight, but 99 percent of it is good."
In an interview with ET earlier this month, Tayshia revealed why she opted to leave California and come to New York.
"My family is still down [in Southern California]... but I really want a firm foundation in something," she said. "And I feel like New York might be it."
"Zac has a really established business out there, and he is doing so much good that I really couldn't sleep at night knowing that I would be keeping him away from doing that," she said of Zac, who founded Release Recovery in 2017. "But also I have been wanting to move to New York forever, so this is kind of like, the perfect storm."
Despite things being good between Tayshia and Zac, the former Bachelorette tells Marie Claire that she opted to keep her California home for "peace of mind" after having to move in with her parents when her first marriage to Josh Bourelle came to an end in 2017.
"It’s not my first rodeo," she says, noting that her decision is not "a setback" for her and Zac's relationship. Rather, she says, "I’m considering this like an adult and trying to set it up for the most success I can."
As for how she feels about Zac, Tayshia is "obsessed with him at this point."
"[It's] weird to say because I don’t like to sound so cliché, but he’s very much everything I need. I have an issue with trust. He’s teaching me to get that back," she says. "At one point, nobody trusted him as an addict. I took a chance on him. We’re very complementary to one another."
Zac, who is sober, was open about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction while on The Bachelorette. That topic, along with eating disorders, Black Lives Matter and mental health struggles were all openly discussed on Tayshia's season, a fact that makes the reality star proud.
"I was in millions of homes of people who haven’t really seen any of these conversations go down or been exposed to any of this type of talk," she says. "... I feel like I shined a little bit of light to just cause people to question and realize how much there is out there that they don’t know and to educate themselves. Even if it was just a little bit of light, it was something."
"I am so proud that I feel like the franchise is really progressing. I mean slowly, but surely," Tayshia added in her ET interview. "But at the same time, we're moving up and I think that they're doing a really good job highlighting everybody's story. And I think that we're going in the right direction."
When Tayshia, who is biracial and identifies as both African American and Mexican, ended her season with an engagement to Zac, who is white, the couple prepared for the "possible backlash that I didn’t choose someone who looks like me," she tells Marie Claire.
Their conversations with The Bachelorette's diversity team, Tayshia says, "prompted a lot of conversations between" her and her fiancé.
"I’m trying to understand and educate myself and talk to [Tayshia] about her experience growing up and what could have helped her and understand that that’s going to be a different experience than I had," Zac says. "At the foundation of our relationship is honesty and being able to have those tough conversations. I’ve never dated an African-American. I’ve never dated a Mexican. So, this is all new in some way."
"When she walked in the room [her race] wasn’t my first thought. My first thought was, 'Wow, she’s gorgeous,'" he continues. "Getting to talk to her and getting to know her, I was attracted to a lot of things, one of which is the ability to have these types of conversations."
While Tayshia and Zac don't know what the future holds, she is excited to find out.
"People expect you to have all the answers by the time you’re 30 years old because you’re a grown woman," she says. "I don’t have all the answers. I’m learning just like everybody else."
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