The Golden Bachelor star Mel Owens has defended not telling Peg Munson that he loved her before or during the Final Rose Ceremony.
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At the Final Rose Ceremony of Mel's The Golden Bachelor season, Mel gave Peg a promise ring and said he wanted her in his future, but he didn't say he was "in love" with her until they went public with their relationship on After the Final Rose.
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Mel has faced criticism for being so guarded all season long and for not even telling Peg that he loved her at the end of his journey.
"Everyone wants the word 'love' to be attached to everything they do, especially on the show. But you can have a great relationship without saying it," Mel told Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt during the Thursday, November 13 episode of the "Bachelor Happy Hour" podcast.
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"It's how you act towards each other, and I knew that the way [Peg] was treating me on the show, I go, 'I know she likes me a lot,' without saying, 'By the way, I love you, I love you, I love you.'"
Mel added, "Because you can love somebody and not like them! Your crazy uncle, you know, you go, 'I love the guy, but I really don't like the guy. I love him, but I don't want to be around him.'"
Mel explained how "love" is not a word he uses lightly, which he had shared multiple times on The Golden Bachelor.
"There are a lot of different meanings and situations and expectations," Mel noted.
"So it's not something where I was saying, 'Oh, I've known you for two weeks and I love you,'" he recalled, seemingly taking a shot at his other finalist, Cindy Angelcyk Cullers, a 60-year-old retired biomedical engineer from Austin, TX.
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"It's like, 'Come on, that's unrealistic!' In my world it is, anyway."
Peg, a 62-year-old retired firefighter and bomb tech from Las Vegas, NV, joined Mel on the podcast and explained how her connection with Mel was "strong," even though she wasn't professing her love to him either.
"And not a lot of people saw it in the house. The women in the house did not see [our connection] because it developed! It grew!" Peg said.
"I didn't come into the mansion going, 'Oh, I want to get married!' No, I didn't do that, because for me, that love grows. It's about, like I said, the fireplace, not the fireworks. Because the fireplace, you can continually refuel it."
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Peg insisted that Mel "feels the same way about" falling in love.
"The reality is, it takes time to fall in love, and it takes time to get to know somebody. And, you know, we both have that same belief system, basically," she explained.
"That might've been the connection, as well," Mel added.
Mel continued, "It wasn't like, 'Oh, by the way, I'm in love with you after two weeks.' Because on [the penultimate] episode, I said, 'Oh, here is Cindy. She's in love with me, and here's Peg. She's not.'"
Mel acknowledged there was "a stark difference" between Cindy and Peg's behavior during filming and how they expressed themselves to him.
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"Because Cindy was saying, 'Oh I love you, I love you,' and Peg was saying, you know, 'We're working on this.' And that's what I said all along, too," Mel recalled.
"[I said], 'I'm not going to fall in love with somebody.' If I thought I was, I had to check myself and say, 'Am I really? I've still got to give it time to see if my brain and my heart can catch up with my hormones. [I'd ask myself], 'So you might be in love? Well, wait a little bit here and check it out.'"
Joe pointed out how feelings of love can also be a product of The Bachelor bubble and environment.
"You wanted to make sure it was for sure and not just the situation," Joe acknowledged.
"But you know what? Love is different for everybody. Everybody has their own idea of love," Peg explained.
"Everybody has their own preconceived idea of what that is and what that looks like, and everybody has a right to that. It just so happens that him and I are on the exact same page when it comes to building a relationship. We are realists; we don't live in Fantasy Land."
Peg said she and Mel are well aware that love "takes time" but they both felt a connection "early on."
Peg recalled, "I can't even explain it, but I felt it, and it scared me. Because I wasn't expecting it. I was like, 'Holy sh-t, what is this?! This is crazy.'"
Peg told Joe and Serena that she knew she was "in trouble" when she and Mel enjoyed their one-on-one date at the Orange County Festival.
"I did not go into this thing with, 'I want to get married and I want a ring and I want to live happily ever after. This is it,'" Peg shared.
"No, I just came here, like, 'Let me check this out. Let me see what kind of a person he is.'"
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Mel said he knew "earlier on" that Peg had the potential to be The One and he "had a crush on her" from the first time he saw her in her cocktail dress on Night 1.
"Right then, I knew," Mel said.
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Peg also said she "felt it" with Mel when they sat down to talk that first night.
"When I looked into his eyes, it was just that connection right then and there," Peg explained.
"And it just took me back, but I knew that I needed to get to know him. I thought, 'The connection is there. I feel it, I know he feels it.' It was electric, but now, we have to build on that foundation."
Peg said she and Mel had to determine if they could fit into each other's lives.
"The word 'love' is great, but you know, it takes more than love to have a successful and sustainable relationship, especially in our sixties, we know that. We've both been through divorce," Peg noted.
Peg said it's great to say you're in love, but you need a strong foundation.
When asked if he was worried about falling into the love trap on The Golden Bachelor, Mel replied, "No because I followed the show a lot, earlier on, from 2002 or 2003. I followed it for maybe five or six years. And then I had my kids, and then I just fell off."
Mel admitted he didn't know any of the leads or characters in subsequent seasons.
"And I only saw The Golden Bachelor when the girls got out to meet [Gerry Turner]," Mel recalled.
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"So I didn't know about the show, really. I learned about it after I was cast for it. It got more in-depth and I started looking at clips to get more familiar with it."
On The Golden Bachelor's Season 2 finale, Cindy quit during her Fantasy Suite date because Mel had talked about how he couldn't see himself getting engaged to his winning bachelorette for two years.
On top of that, Mel confessed he was "torn" between his Final 2 bachelorettes and didn't feel love for either of them yet.
Cindy, seemingly desperate for validation and vulnerability from Mel, explained how she had joined The Golden Bachelor as a leap of faith and was expecting an engagement at the Final Rose Ceremony.
"You know the saying, 'First comes love, then comes marriage'... That's how it works," Mel told Cindy.
Cindy said she wanted a commitment from Mel -- which she didn't think was too much to ask for -- and so it didn't seem like he was her guy.
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After Cindy left the show, Mel continued the journey with Peg, who met his two sons.
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