Why Did 'The Bachelorette' Stars Becca and Garrett Break Up?

Reality television has been such a huge part of our entertainment world for the past decade. It's spawned into a whole separate genre of what to watch, launched some unknown people into stardom, and has given fans a lot of drama to watch along the way. 

Watching shows like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, it can be easy to forget that the people on the screen are real, but they are very real and, sometimes, they find real love. So, why did Becca Kufrin and Garrett Yrigoyen break up?

It's probably not too much of a surprise to hear that most often, the relationships that spark from ABC's The Bachelor or The Bachelorette don't have the best track record. More often than not, the couple who makes it to the end don't end up getting married after all.  

Some break up pretty quickly after the show ends; others stay together for a bit before calling it quits. The truth is, they don't know each other too well before agreeing to get married. 

But, some couples make it. Ryan and Trista Sutter are still together, and she was the original Bachelorette. Sean Lowe and Catherine Giudici are going strong many years and three kids later. Desiree Hartsock and her final rose, Chris Siegfried, are going strong, too. And it also seems there's a much better track record for people who get engaged from The Bachelorette vs The Bachelor. 

So, when Bachelorette Becca Kufrin and Garrett Yrigoyen got engaged on the August 2018 finale of The Bachelorette, people were hopeful that they were going to stay together. But it didn't take long for the issues already present in their relationship to show. 

As the show began to air, Garrett was under fire for some Instagram posts he had "liked" before filming the season. He was allegedly "liking" content that made fun of immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and Parkland shooting survivors. When the headlines started coming out, Garrett said he leaned on Becca to help him grow. 

"I'm just trying to grow as a person, be a better person on a daily basis. She's helped me through everything," he said during the 2018 live After the Final Rose special and he issued a second apology. "We’ve been honest and open and transparent with one another since the beginning. And when that all came out, we attacked it, because I feel like when I was ‘liking’ things, it was going against what she stands for, and that made it really hard on us as a couple. So when we started talking about that, we got through that together, and we’re growing, we’re progressing and we’re moving forward.”

While it seems like the two worked through those initial problems, the couple found themselves in a similar situation a few years later when Garrett defended the police amid the Black Lives Matter movement in June 2020. 

Previous Bachelorettes Rachel Lindsay and Becca discussed Garrett on the podcast they co-host, Bachelor Happy Hour. Becca initially defended Garrett before saying a week later that she was wrong and admitted that things were not good between the two of them. 

Three months later, Becca officially announced that the two had broken up. While neither specifically said the difference in their political and human rights beliefs were the cause of their split, that's what most people are assuming. 

“After many conversations, we came to this decision. It wasn’t something that we just arrived at one night,” Becca said on Instagram regarding the breakup with Garrett. “It wasn’t based solely off of one Instagram post or somebody else’s opinions or comments. There’s much more to it. To any relationship, there’s a lot of layers, and it’s not for me to divulge details. It’s no one’s business other than what I’m telling you right now.”