It’s a moment he’s looked back on more than a few times since he and the journalist and podcast host—turning 33 Mar. 6—starting dating in earnest in early 2018. For real this time, with nary an ABC camera in sight. “It’s interesting to think if we left as a couple on Bachelor in Paradise season two if we would still be dating today,” the 32-year-old speculated on “Help! I Suck at Dating” that May, the podcast he shares with fellow alum Dean Unglert, “’cause I go back and forth whether we would be.”
Gun to his head, he said, he’d guess yes, but at this point it doesn’t really matter. Because when he realized his feelings for his best friend were more than platonic—after several years of internally struggling to decide if the love he felt was that type of love—he knew she’d be receiving all of his roses for the foreseeable future. “We see this as, you know, it for us,” he explained. “Life partner, marriage, kids, the whole—I mean, I hope so.”
And while their journey didn’t exactly move at typical Bachelor warp speeds, they’ve already checked off a few milestones. While in Mexico filming the 2018 season of Bachelor in Paradise—the same site where their relationship began three years earlier—Haibon got down on bended knee with a Neil Lane princess-cut diamond in hand, making good on the vow he had told E! News days earlier at the 2018 iHeartRadio KIIS FM Wango Tango By AT&T: “It feels good to know I’ll never go on a first date again.”
