TV Bachelor Canada Winner 20141119
Tim Warmels picked April Brockman, a 27-year-old realtor from Wasaga Beach, Ont., to be his bride on “The Bachelor Canada.” (Rogers Media) The Canadian Press
Television

The Bachelor Canada interview: What now?

Colin Horgan from the Maclean’s Bachelor Canada panel interviews Tim Warmels and his new fiancée, April
By Colin Horgan

One day following the final episode of the second season of The Bachelor Canada, I sat down with the new couple, Bachelor Tim Warmels and his fiancée, April Brockman. We chatted about the basis for Tim’s ultimate decision, the reality of reality TV, and “the whole stinky thing.”

CH: How are things? You guys all right?

April Brockman: It’s very surreal.

Tim Warmels: It’s such a relief.

CH: To be done?

TW: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s um, there are nice parts about having it be very private and not being able to tell anyone about it, but then you’re also missing like, an entire part of your life when that is the case. So yeah, it’s nice because it makes you focus on yourselves – having to be private – but there’s an entire part of life that we’re so excited to normal about.

CH: Right, you can actually go have a coffee and not worry about it.

TW: Yeah.

CH: April was, if I may, a little stand-off-ish from the get-go. What about that was appealing to you [Tim], or was there something else that you saw? Was it that she was unsure, was it that she wasn’t really getting into the drama?

TW: One of our very first conversations was indicative of what you’re seeing in this whole thing. And that conversation was around her not believing this was a competition. To her it was: “I’m going to come here, I’m going to see if he’s right for me, and if he’s not, then that’s fine. Or: even if I like him, and he has a stronger connection with one of the other girls, then I’m happy for them.” When she said that to me I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly how it should be!”

CH: And nobody else said that?

TW: Yeah, and no one else said that.

AB: Which is crazy to me.

TW: So that very first conversation, I thought, “There’s something else going on here.” And there were other conversations where we just really lined up on a very deep philosophical level that, y’know, no one wants to show those conversations on TV.

CH: April, your perception of that relationship: Did you have a feeling at any point before you guys were in Tahiti or anything, that you thought: “I feel like this is going to work out.” Or were you pretty unsure about it until the end?

AB: I was not sure for a very long time, but we’re so limited in the amount of time that we could actually spend together, and the producers don’t want you to have that off-camera time because they want to capture it all. But some of our conversations that progressed the relationship were off-camera. So, all these little conversations we kept having, although they were limited and short and far and few between, those little conversations were what kept me open to staying. Because, I swear, I honestly thought, “Y’know, I don’t really know, I’m not sure, I might send myself home next week,” and then we would have a conversation and I’d be like, “No, something’s here, I’m going to be open to it.” I was very realistic about the whole thing going into it. I was there to date a guy, and if we had a connection, great, I would continue and pursue it. And if not, if I didn’t feel it, I was going to send myself home.

TW: It came down to the line for us. I mean, even in that letter that you gave me at the end, you said, “You follow your heart in the moment and I’ll follow mine.” Which was her way of telling me: “If you ask me to marry you or if you pick me, I don’t know what I’m going to say but I will follow my heart in the moment and you do the same, and if you feel like it’s right, then ask.” So going into that proposal, I was like, “I know I want to be with her but I actually don’t know what she’s going to say.”

CH: So why go for the proposal, why not just go for the final rose?

TW: Because why not?

AB: Because – I struggled with this too – and the thing is, quite honestly, we knew for a long time, you had told me. So, I knew we were going to be together regardless, and that was fine with me.

CH: Regardless if it was a rose or a ring?

AB: Yeah. I knew we were going to go home, I was going to date this guy, we were going to see what happens in real life. But if the way our relationship was progressing on the show was indicative to what real life would be like, of course I want to marry him. I’d be crazy not to.

CH: So you both mentioned the portrayal of what was going on versus sort of what actually happened, and you just said “real life versus the show.” I think that, for me, is the most confusing part of this. How do you know what you’re experiencing within the confines of the program is going to actually be reflected when you leave?

TW: That’s the biggest thing. And this was what drew me to you [April] the most. If you weren’t feeling something, you were honest about it. That level of honesty, that got me to be like, “Well, I know that anything that comes out of her mouth is going to be what she’s feeling.”

AB: I’m a terrible actress.

TW: She’s the worst actress ever.

CH: So this is it for you in TV?

AB: Done.

TW: So yeah, there are two aspects to your question. One is that you wonder: is this how it’s going to be in real life, or is this just how it is now and the feeling’s not going to be there? So you do everything you can, but at a certain point, you’re not going to be able to know unless you try. Then the other aspect of what you’re talking about is the portrayal of what happens on-screen versus what we’re talking about. The issue is just that, this is an hour of television [and] that represents a week of our very, very focused life. And our very focused life is the focus of our relationship and dating. So, we have packed years of dating into six or eight weeks. So when the TV sees it as emotions going like this – all of a sudden it’s up, and all of a sudden it’s down – it’s like, “No, those conversations were hours long.” But there’s only time to show a little bit of it. So it’s hard to get that cadence.

CH: Did you feel that it was pretty accurate though, watching it back? That it showed things accurately?

TW: Yeah, it showed things accurately, but because it’s so short it just seems like … crazy.

AB: I mean, the interaction with Tim’s parents – it was that awkward. It was. But there was a lot of good to it too, which they neglected to show.

TW: My parents love her now, we spend time together all the time.

AB: It was a stressful situation. I’m in Tahiti, locked up, about to make a huge decision and I don’t have any of my family, any of my girlfriends to talk to, and I’m meeting your parents. So it was stressful.

TW: Then when you [April] came back to me that next morning, after everything had been said and done and you said, “Look, I’ve woken up this morning, I’ve written this, I’ve thought about this,” that conversation was a long conversation. I was sitting there like, “What’s up? Like, I need you to be here as much as I am here,” and it’s so hard to see that in such a short little clip.

CH: So, I read your blog.

TW: Okay.

CH: And I went back a bit. So maybe this is slightly unfair, but three years ago you wrote something about how there was a friend of yours who’d taken a cab ride and the cab driver had told him that you need to make a list of things you hate about your partner, and if you can’t live with those, you’ve got to get rid of them.

TW: Yeah, it’s decision via negativa.

CH: Right, okay, so do you still feel that way? Because in that post, you say he seems to be right.

TW: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s actually how I went about the whole show. I wasn’t like, “Who do I think is amazing, let me keep those.” I was like, “Who do I know that there’s not a relationship in the future here.” That’s how I did it. I think that made the producers a little bit mad because I wanted to send people home when I knew there wasn’t a connection. Usually you bring three or four people to the final location, and I was like, “I know there’s nothing there with Sachelle” – not that there’s nothing, but that the relationship won’t go as far as it would with the other women. And yeah, I really do stand by that. I really do. I think our society has swung a little bit too far to this idea of romantic love, where everything just falls into place. Whereas, I’m like, no, you need that passion, you need that feeling, but there’s a decision there that allows that to be so much more furthered.

CH: April, do you feel the same way?

AB: We talk about this a lot actually.

CH: Really?

AB: Yeah, well, because, I mean, normal relationship problems. The whole stinky thing.

TW: Yeah, the whole stinky thing.

AB: Like, the little annoyances where I’m like, “Can I live with this? I don’t know.” And so —

TW: A month into our relationship — like a month back — she shows up at my door and she’s got like, I crap you not, 80 bucks worth of Old Spice products: antiperspirant, shower gel, a nice great exfoliating loofa. And she’s like, “Babe, you stink.” [laughs]

AB: Seriously. But like, all those little annoyances — in one of your [Tim’s] talks you talk about: “Here’s this woman or this man that I’m dating and they’re amazing, they’re this, they check all my boxes except they cross their legs just a little bit funny and I’m sure I could go out and find this exact person who probably doesn’t cross their legs as annoyingly as you do.” And those are the little things that he [Tim] sort of teaches me, because otherwise I’m going to be searching forever and ever for the perfect one, right? And there’s nobody perfect. You have to love the imperfections as well.

CH: Okay, so one more thing. About Sachelle: Was it her brother who turned you off?

TW: No! Oh my God, no! He was looking at me and he was laughing while he said it. No way, no way. When he said that – “I think I can take him” – he was totally joking about that. No, not at all.

CH: Because my wager is that it was Italy where you decided on that.

TW: No, and this is the other thing: I said this to [Sachelle] in the Women Tell All. I respected her for telling me. Because you know what? It had to be said, because otherwise I would have not gotten that side of the story from anyone. […] I hadn’t seen anyone else except for Sachelle after Lisa had told me. So Lisa told me at night, and then the next day was my date with Sachelle, and then right away was the rose ceremony.

CH: So nobody else had a chance.

TW: Exactly. No one else had a chance, so Sachelle was like, “I know no one else has a chance” and she manned up and she knew she was going to take flak for it. […] And then the other thing with Sachelle is, as with all of those relationships – Trish and Sachelle in particular – those ones that went really far that I really did have a connection with, there wasn’t anything in particular that I can pick out where it was like, “Ah, she just wasn’t this or she just wasn’t that” or anything like that.

CH: That she crossed her legs wrong.

TW: Yeah, exactly. It was that there was something else that just completely overshadowed them.

CH: April, are you going to be happy that Tim’s not going to be talking about other women for a while now?

AB: I’m used to it.

CH: Don’t get too used to it.

TW: Well, she knows all my ex-girlfriends. She goes out to dinner with them.

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.