Rachel Lindsay Questions If She Was Ever Happy With Bryan Abasolo

Rachel Lindsay came to some “realizations” about her past marriage after recently attending a friend’s wedding in Cancún, Mexico.

“I have never heard more beautiful vows. They both were beautiful, but hers to him — she didn’t write it down — you could just tell the joy was pouring out of her pores,” Lindsay, 39, shared on the Tuesday, March 25, episode of her “Higher Learning” podcast. “It made me question. I said, ‘I don’t remember being that joyous.’ I was like, ‘Wow.’ It was such beautiful love. It was infectious.”

Lindsay was previously married to her Bachelorette winner, Bryan Abasolo, from 2019 to 2024. The two were wrapped up in a messy divorce battle before finalizing their split earlier this year.

On the podcast, Lindsay’s cohost, Van Lathan Jr., questioned how much of her marriage with Abasolo “was business.” The former Bachelorette clarified she “didn’t get married for business,” but said their romance began to feel more transactional toward its end.

“It felt like I was putting on a front to keep up with appearances and protect reputation and stuff like that,” she explained. “So, that felt like business.”

On top of feeling societal pressure (and pressure from Bachelor Nation fans) about reaching certain relationship milestones, Lindsay noted that she put a lot of pressure on herself “as a woman who was in her 30s and had put career first.” She stated, “I just felt like, ‘Oh, I’m behind on certain things.’ I do think that if we had met in real life, I would have never been married. I think I would have — without the public pressure, without me putting pressure on myself of, you know, ‘Oh, I should be married by now. I want kids’ — I think that I would have flushed out certain issues that I had from the beginning.”

Feeling pressured to reach certain relationship goals is a topic Lindsay said she would love to write about. “I feel like a lot of women who were similarly situated, who maybe were taught to put career first, and they’re successful in every area of their life, and then, they look up and they’re like, ‘Man, I thought I’d be married right now. Man, I feel like my biological clock is ticking.’ You feel like, ‘This relationship is the last relationship is the last relationship,” she said on the podcast.

Lindsay continued, “And if you don’t make this work, then it’s gonna be hard for you to find somebody else.’ I absolutely felt like that. And the more that I talked to women — ‘cause I have a lot of single friends — they kind of feel that same way, too. So, there was a bit of desperation in it, too.”

Lindsay shared a clip of her podcast quotes via Instagram on Tuesday, writing, “I don’t talk much about what went down in my marriage but this past weekend I went to my first wedding since my divorce. And I had some realizations and honest conversations with myself. As women, we have some added pressures that maybe we need to be more honest with ourselves about.”

Earlier this year, Lindsay told TMZ that “it feels great” to move on in her life after her and Abasolo’s divorce. “It feels like a fresh start,” she said on January 21.