‘The Bachelorette’ Finale: How Did Jenn’s Love Story End?

SPOILER ALERT: The following article contains spoilers for the finale of “The Bachelorette” Season 21.

All season long, promos for “The Bachelorette” finale have featured host Jesse Palmer telling season lead Jenn Tran, “No Bachelorette has ever done this.” Finally, on Tuesday night, viewers got to see Jenn make her choice.

Last week’s “Fantasy Suites” episode saw Jenn narrow her field from three contestants down to two as she sent home Jonathon Johnson. Their breakup was an emotional one, with both acknowledging that they had a strong connection but that Jonathon simply hadn’t progressed as far as Devin Strader and Marcus Shoberg had.

Going into the finale, there was no clear frontrunner: Jenn’s decision to tell Marcus she was in love with him came easily to her, but he wasn’t ready to say it back — whereas Devin had confessed his love far earlier, after his hometown date, but didn’t hear those words in return until approaching Jenn in a state of anxiety days after their night in the fantasy suite.

However, Jenn’s choice became more discernible during Tuesday’s three-hour finale after she took both men to meet her family in Hawaii.

During his visit with Jenn’s family, Marcus admitted to her mother Trinh and aunt Lylan that he still wasn’t in love with Jenn.

“I believe that I can get there. I know that I’m not right now,” Marcus said. “For the last few weeks, I’ve been beating myself up. It’s just like, why am I not feeling what I want to feel? I’ve been missing this feeling of certainty and that makes me unsure. And I want to get there for her.”

Before their final date in Hawaii, a confused and frustrated Jenn approached Marcus in his hotel room to get answers about where they stand in their relationship.

“I don’t know if you see me in your future,” she told him.

“I know that my feelings for you are real and that I can picture it with you,” Marcus said. “I don’t understand why it’s so scary for me to move forward with someone I care so much about.”

Despite Marcus finally telling Jenn he loves her and wants to fight for their relationship, Jenn sent him home without going on their final date.

The morning after breaking up with Marcus, Jenn questioned what she would do if Devin proposed to her.

“I really need to follow my heart today,” Jenn told Jesse during a one-on-one conversation. “Going into today, I thought I knew which way I wanted it to go, and I woke up this morning with a totally different point of view on it.”

Jenn then shared her plan, saying: “I have to choose myself. I’m not going to let Devin propose to me today — I’m going to propose to Devin.”

She added: “I want him to know that I’m going to fight for him every day, and I’m going to choose him every day.”

However, “The Bachelorette” didn’t roll the footage of the proposal. Instead, the show cut back to Jesse in the live studio.

“You won’t be seeing that proposal,” he said. “That’s right. Because of what transpired since that day in Hawaii, we decided it wouldn’t be appropriate for anyone to see it until we heard from Jenn.”

The leading lady joined Jesse on stage, where she revealed to the audience what unfolded after she and Devin left Hawaii as an engaged couple.

“It’s been a really hard couple of months,” Jenn began as she fought back tears. “We had left Hawaii engaged and very happy. I thought that I had found the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and then, essentially, as soon as we had left Hawaii, things were just different. It kind of just felt like he was pulling away.”

“I felt like I was secondary to everything else in his life … and I didn’t understand why,” she added. “We had a happy couple [visit] planned sometime last month early and the night before, he called me, and he basically broke off the engagement. He had basically said that he didn’t love me anymore and didn’t feel the same way.”

She continued: “He felt like something had been off since the second he proposed — he regretted getting engaged. And I didn’t know. I knew all along it was just different.”

Jesse eventually welcomed Devin to the stage; the crowd booed as he walked over and sat next to Jenn.

“I don’t even know where to start,” Jenn told Devin. “I just think this conversation right now between the two of us is not what I had wanted and is not something that is going to be meaningful to me. Because we had talked about this and we had said that our relationship is our relationship, and no matter where you felt and no matter how I felt, we had both wanted a conversation off-camera.”

Jenn then said to her ex-fiancée that she can “try to understand somebody changing their mind about the way they feel about somebody.” However, what she couldn’t understand was what Devin did after ending their engagement, including following former “Bachelor” contestant Maria Georgas on Instagram the next day.

“Not only is that so disrespectful to everything that we had shared together, I just don’t understand it, why you would do something like that,” Jenn said. “It completely invalidated the entire relationship.”

“I failed you,” Devin declared at one point. “And there’s nothing I can say other than that. But everything I felt for you was real.”

After Jenn and Devin’s tense conversation, Jesse brought up the proposal.

“It’s a beautiful proposal — the likes of which we have never seen,” the host told the leading lady. He then asked if they “should all watch it together.”

“Do I have a choice?” retorted Jenn.

The footage showed Jenn surprising Devin by proposing to him with a wedding band inside a seashell.

“I love you so deeply, Devin, but I can’t let you propose to me. I’ve decided to choose myself in this journey, and the best version of myself is when I’m with you,” she told him before popping the question.

Devin answered, “Absolutely. A hundred times over.” He then got down on one knee and proposed right back.

“I do not regret proposing to that man on there,” Jenn said on the live show. “But what happened was, that man doesn’t exist anymore. And the truth of the matter is, I’m still that same woman I am.”

Next up for the “Bachelor” franchise, Joan Vassos will lead the inaugural season of “The Golden Bachelorette,” which premieres on Sept. 18. Next spring, ABC will debut Season 29 of “The Bachelor,” led by Jenn’s former suitor Grant Ellis. Also coming in 2025 is Season 10 of “Bachelor in Paradise”; Jonathon received the first invitation to the season during last week’s “Men Tell All” episode, followed by Hakeem Moulton, another of Jenn’s former suitors.