Clare Crawley Called Her Relationship With Dale "Tumultuous" & "Awful"
“It crushed me, it crushed my spirit.”
Clare Crawley got candid about her relationship with Dale Moss in an Aug. 8 interview. On The Ben And Ashley I. Almost Famous Podcast, the former Bachelorette opened up about how her romance with Moss “brought out the worst” in her — and she came with plenty of examples of her ex’s less-than-stellar boyfriend behavior.
Recalling their whirlwind relationship — the couple got engaged after less than two weeks on The Bachelorette in 2020, then dated on and off for a year — Crawley said, “It crushed me, it crushed my spirit, it crushed … in so many ways who I was as a woman. It brought me down to a level I didn’t want to be at.” She told hosts Ashley Iaconetti and Ben Higgins, “I found myself crying day after day after day, feeling so low… reverting to old habits of begging someone for their love.”
After the couple broke up for the second (and final) time in September 2021, it took Crawley some time to recover from their romance. “I was lost after that. Before the show, I had it together. I was strong Clare,” she said, explaining that many people who have been through “tumultuous, awful relationships” understand what she meant.
Per Crawley, after their split, she “focused on rebuilding” herself with “a lot of therapy.” She explained, “[I] brought myself back to who I was.” But that doesn’t mean it was easy to move forward after she and Moss went their separate ways. “It paralyzed me temporarily, especially because the very last day that I saw him ... was the day I was gonna have to say goodbye to my mother because she was really, really sick,” she recalled. “He basically said, ‘That’s not my problem,’ and I begged him to please not leave me in that moment.” Later, however, she questioned her response to Moss’ actions: “Why am I begging this man to have human decency?’”
That wasn’t the only time Moss let her down. Crawley recalled that when she removed her breast implants in August 2021, her then-fiancé wasn’t exactly a support system. “Getting my breast implants out and going through surgery, I felt super super sick,” she said. “He showed up, took a selfie for social media, and left the next day while I was recovering from surgery ... just to show people that he was there.” Finding a silver lining, Crawley said his callous attitude helped give her the clarity she needed. “It worked out in my favor because all that time that he was ignoring me ... I was allowed that time to process everything he did.”
Crawley sees her ex as a major contrast to now-husband Ryan Dawkins: “It makes me cry all the time now, how grateful I am for Ryan because ... he’s so good to me and there [for me] in the darkest, deepest moments,” she reflected. Crawley and Dawkins got married in February and are expecting their first baby together in January 2024.
