While the process was undeniably difficult, Abbie says after five months of grieving— and "crying myself to sleep about this man"— she was able to close their chapter... Or so she thought.
Halfway through the season, as she continued to watch her romantic dates with Matt play out, she suddenly realised her feelings for him never really left.
"I was crying about it again and it all kinda came back ’til maybe two weeks after the finale aired.”
She continued: “You leave the rock in Africa you got f***ing dumped on and then you’re like I don’t talk to you ever again. Usually, in a breakup, I’m like, ‘Can I call you?’ four days later, ‘Can we just like talk about this?’ I could never do that. It was like, everything was perfect and then the next morning it wasn’t."
Since her season of The Bachelor aired on our screens, Abbie has been forced to deal with an unfathomable amount of hate which stemmed from being perceived as a "man stealer", she says.
"I make sexual comments, and I’m like a playboy in their mind. They see me as the high school b*tch who stole their boyfriend. How can you be a ‘man stealer’ in the situation where the point of this show is to make the man love you?”
In recent weeks, after Matt confirmed he'd parted ways with Chelsie McLeod, Abbie was required to defend herself after a tabloid magazine called her a "homewrecker" and blamed her for being the reason behind their split.
"Hey! This is completely false," she wrote on her Instagram Story alongside a screenshot of the magazine's article. "Stop writing sh*t like this and driving forward the narrative that I'm a 'homewrecker' or a 'man stealer' because it makes people click and hate me more. :) thanks."
"They were hamming it up. It was kind of weird though," he said on his podcast, The Babble, with Nat Bassingthwaighte. "But then Abbie said, 'guys should we kiss?'... they were pretending to kiss so they were really hamming it up... I think they then continued posting back at someone's house... They had obviously left the event together."
Nat weighed in, brutally claiming: “It’s just like a cry for attention, it’s just like look at us, I don’t want to be in the media but here’s all the information required to get me into the media."
Through tears, Abbie later hit back, saying: "I'm so sick of being spoken about like I'm a character that has nothing but evil motivations. You don't know me, you clearly don't even follow me on Instagram because the information here is incorrect. You've never experienced anything close to what I have in regard to media and public bullying. The lack of empathy and understanding is shocking."
