The current franchise lead thought he may have made a mistake when his season started airing.
Clayton Echard's Bachelor journey hasn't always been easy. The current franchise lead appeared on the latest episode of Nick Viall's The Viall Files podcast, and revealed that he regretted signing on to the show when it started airing on TV.
"I think the first three weeks of the show airing, I definitely thought that, because you just don’t know what to expect going into it," he said of regretting his decision to become the Bachelor, immediately after appearing on Michelle Young's season of The Bachelorette.
"Having no frame of reference, not really watching prior shows. I went straight from Michelle's season to jumping into my own, so I didn't have that time in between to really reach out to [past] Bachelor, Bachelorettes, ask them these questions that now I'm asking," Clayton explained. "... Having that reassurance, I didn't get that."
Because he didn't know what to expect from the process, Clayton initially thought that he would grow on viewers as his season aired, but it didn't exactly turn out that way.
"I thought, 'This is going to be great. Everyone's going to come around, start seeing my personality,' and people weren't," he lamented. "It seemed like no matter what they showed, even when they showed my personality, showed me being goofy, people would still say, 'He has no personality.' It's like, what more do you want to see? I'm showing you this on social media and you're still wanting to find something to be mad about."
For Clayton, the ensuing social media comments "became this hopeless battle of you're not going to make anybody happy."
"To me, I just wasn’t ready for the magnitude of criticism I was going to face," he admitted, before explaining why he doesn't let the naysayers bother him anymore.
"The more I spoke with people, I realized this is kind of just how it is. Now I have truly become numb to it in the last week or two," he said. "The negativity in my inbox is the same thing I've seen for the last four or five weeks, and it just doesn't have the same bite anymore. It doesn't matter at this point to me, because I'm happy with people I have in my life and that's ultimately what's pushing me forward."
Also, he noted, "If you're projecting your own anger on somebody you don't even know, that's an internal issue on your own end."
"If they feel that them yelling at me is going to help them get out that anger and make themselves feel a little better, then so be it. I don't understand it, but for some people it's kind of like venting, and I guess that's what they want to do, they want to vent to me and tell me how terrible I am," Clayton said. "It is what it is. They can be in my DMs. It's fine. I'll just continue to ignore them."
As for how his season turns out, Clayton told ET in January, "I'm in a great spot. I am happy. Ultimately, any time I can grow from an experience, if it is good or bad, I feel like it was worth it, and it was."
Clayton Echard's season of The Bachelor airs Mondays on ABC. ET has got you covered throughout the entirety of his season with all of our Bachelor content.
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