Bachelor Nation alum Graham Bunn is breaking down the end of his relationship with Chrishell Stause.
“If Chrishell sees this: You’re the best,” Graham, 46, quipped on the Tuesday, June 3, episode of the “Almost Famous” podcast. “She’s happily married [and] an incredibly hard worker. We don’t have the greatest relationship right now … but sometimes when you love really hard, the breakup’s really hard.”
Graham, who previously appeared on DeAnna Pappas’ season of The Bachelorette before hitting the Paradise beach in 2014, was linked to the Selling Sunset star, now 43, before any of his reality TV stints. According to Graham, Chrishell ended their romance after she was allegedly asked to lead The Bachelorette in 2008.
“I don’t think she would mind me saying [that] we were young love,” Graham recalled of Chrishell, who is now married to Australian drummer G Flip. “Our relationship fully existed outside the parameters of real life, like, we didn’t think about future [and] we didn’t think about money. All we thought about was, ‘Man, I can’t wait for this day to be over, so I can get back to spending time with this person.’ I was addicted to her.”
According to Graham, their eventual breakup was “very messy.”
“I still have struggles with it because I’ve never loved someone in that way,” he said. “We were dating, and Chrishell had gone through something very hard. She had gone through a broken engagement [with Matthew Morrison] … and that relationship probably took its toll on her, so she didn’t want anything serious. When we started dating, it was in a group setting, [and] we just started spending time together.”
Graham further revealed that he got into a drunken “bar fight” on his birthday over a random stranger flirting with Chrishell.
“Chrishell was like, ‘Hey, listen, I can’t be with someone who reacts that way,’” Graham said. “It’s heartbreaking, but I totally understand. We had a very mature conversation four days after my birthday. Well, a little bit of time goes by, and she kept checking in.”
He continued, “I had it bad for her, so I was like, ‘I’m doing good. Is the agreement off? Are we still hanging?’ She came to me and she told me, ‘Listen, I misrepresented why I wanted to break up.’”
Graham then noted that Chrishell told him that she had “the opportunity to be the Bachelorette.”
“The franchise had approached her. She had been on an ABC show,” he recalled, referring to Chrishell’s soap opera past. “She had been through a broken engagement, and they wanted to pursue her to be the Bachelorette, and she felt, at the time, that it was the best opportunity for her.”
Graham ended up “wishing [Chrishell] well” before they went their separate ways.
“I went on to live my life. I was in my late 20s and living in New York City. I was a bartender in Times Square,” he said. “I was meeting a lot of people, I was living with my best friend from college, so I had a great support system around me. Fast-forward to end of January, something happened and they gave the show to DeAnna, so Chrishell reached back out to me.”
While Graham said that Chrishell wanted to hang out again, he was ultimately “hesitant” to rekindle their romance.
“It was really hard on me, the first time, stepping away,” he added. “So, we did — and then my grandfather passed away, unfortunately. … The person that I leaned on was Chrishell.”
Graham left New York to be with his family, finally returning in time for Valentine’s Day when he attempted to make plans with Chrishell. However, she already made alternative arrangements. Instead, Graham “indulged” himself at a local bar before a casting producer came up and asked if he wanted to appear on The Bachelorette.
“They had a picture of DeAnna, so I knew it wasn’t Chrishell,” he said of the producers. “Chrishell was supposed to do the show, and then I ended up on it. It probably wasn’t fair to DeAnna because I was a mess, I was still heartbroken and I felt like our relationship ended for reasons that weren’t me.”
Graham was eliminated during the sixth week of DeAnna’s season before unsuccessfully finding The One on Bachelor Pad and Bachelor in Paradise spinoffs.
