While shedding light on his divorce, Bryan Abasolo admitted that family planning with estranged wife Rachel Lindsay “broke my heart” as they struggled with expanding their family.
“I wanted kids like anybody else, but other things were made a priority, which put a lot of pressure on both of us,” Abasolo, 44, told his divorce coach, Rene Garcia, in a YouTube video shared on Saturday, July 20. “Women have a different biological clock than us. It was going to be me going along with a plan, but I was under a hell of a lot of stress.”
It was “tough” and “hard” to watch Lindsay, 39, struggle with fertility issues.
“It felt terrible. Just watching her sadness, it broke my heart,” Abasolo continued.”It was like I was failing expectations on all fronts.”
Lindsay met Abasolo during The Bachelorette season 13 in 2017. He proposed during the show’s season finale. They tied the knot in August 2019. After getting married, the pair told Us Weekly exclusively that they hoped to have kids “sooner rather than later.”
“We’re not preventing it, but if we’re planning, in the next year,” Lindsay shared with Us in October 2019. “We definitely are on the same page in what we want.”
As their marriage progressed, the pair offered more details on why they hadn’t become parents just yet.
“I think we’ve just grown so much together. Obviously, we were engaged for a couple years. Now, we’ve been married for a couple years,” Abasolo explained to Us of his marriage during a June 2022 interview. “We have a new house, we have our dogs, kids are in our future as well. We just got a lot of great things going on.”
By the next year, Lindsay doubled down on Abasolo’s past comments.
“We’re working on having a kid,” she shared on “The Viall Files” podcast in December 2023. “Sometimes that’s not as easy as you think. You think, ‘OK, when I’m ready, it’ll happen,’ and then it doesn’t. So, that’s been a little bit of a struggle too.”
Us confirmed in January that Abasolo had filed for divorce after four years of marriage. He listed their date of separation as December 23, 2023, in the filing and requested spousal support.
Elsewhere in the interview with his divorce coach, Abasolo hinted that the twosome were living different lives for months before he took legal action to end their marriage.
“We didn’t spend enough time with each other,” he said. “I mean, in my estimation, we saw what the other person was doing in the relationship, mainly on Instagram, although we lived in the same house.”
A judge ruled earlier this month that Lindsay pay $13,200 a month in temporary spousal support plus attorney fees. The estranged couple did not have a prenup and their divorce is ongoing.