Arie Called Out 'The Bachelor' For Barely Helping People Find Love

A little skeptical of whether or not The Bachelor process even really works? Well, it turns out you have every right to be. Even former star of the show Arie Luyendyk Jr. says The Bachelor doesn't help people find love. “It’s such a difficult — I hate to call it process — but it is a difficult show,” the race car driver shared during a June 10 appearance on the Couple Things With Shawn and Andrew podcast. "And that’s probably why you find that a lot of people don’t make it is because it’s just so taxing emotionally.”

The problem with the show's setup is that it really is just a staged as it appears to be on screen. “It’s just, like, it’s not natural to have two people that you [have], at the end, and then have to break up with one person and get engaged to another person an hour later," Luyendyk explained. "It’s just so weird. It’s, like, no wonder it barely works.”

This isn't the first time Luyendyk Jr. criticized the show. “I’ve got to say as a Bachelor, I feel like you’re almost set up to fail,” he told Us Weekly back in May. “It’s, like, a recipe for disaster. So, if there is a normal happy ending, like a Sean Lowe, Catherine [Giudici] ending, you’re almost surprised.”

Luckily for Luyendyk, he was also able to walk away from the show with a happy ending. The two finalists on his season were Becca Kufrin and Lauren Burnham. Luyendyk wound up giving the final rose to Kufrin, then changed his mind and went back to Burnham, to whom he's now married.

“I didn’t think she was that into me the whole beginning of the show, so I kind of let other relationships develop and then it got toward the end and I was like ‘Oh dang! She actually really likes me,’” Luyendyk shared during his appearance on Couple Things With Shawn and Andrew. “And then it was just like, our relationship bloomed so late in that whole Bachelor world that, that’s why the ending got a little mixed up.”

Burnham, who appeared alongside him on the podcast, agreed with her husband, saying that it “takes time to build trust” and that “it’s so hard to do that in such a short amount of time.”

The system may be flawed, but hey. Looks like it wound up working out for them.