Prior Lake's Becca Kufrin makes final two on 'The Bachelor'

Prior Lake American

Encounters with an ex are almost always awkward.

Maybe you run into them at the same aisle in the grocery store and skirt around them with your cart and give them a short “How do you do?” Maybe you are in the same line at the Department of Motor Vehicles but both of you say nothing, hoping that the other won’t start a conversation.

Maybe your ex shows up to the filming of a television show with more than five million viewers per episode in an attempt to win you back after finding out you were competing for the affection of another man on the aforementioned television show.

It happens to the best of us.

OK, maybe it’s just happened to Prior Lake’s Becca Kufrin.

Fantasy suites and ‘I love you’

Kufrin is currently a contestant on “The Bachelor,” where 29 women compete for the love of — and engagement to — one man, which in this case is race car driver and realtor Arie Luyendyk. Week by week, the contestant pool has been slimmed until it is down to three women competing for Luyendyk’s affection on the episode that aired Feb. 26 — Kufrin, Lauren Burnham and Kendall Long.

In “Bachelor” and “Bachelorette” tradition, the week with three contestants left is “fantasy suite” week, where contestants are able to spend the night alone with the lead for the first time — and alone means no cameras, no microphones and presumably no producers.

Though the fantasy suite can be rejected, all three women accepted the night alone with Luyendyk after their respective dates.

Kufrin and Luyendyk spent the day portion of the date on a boat looking at wildlife before settling in for dinner in the sand dunes of Peru. During the dinner, Kufrin tells Luyendyk she is in love with him.

“Moment by moment, you started taking my heart and taking pieces of it and I started to like, really see what this could be,” Kufrin said to Luyendyk. “Then hometowns came ... which I’m not going to lie, I was a little nervous for. The next day, I was just like, daydreaming, looking at the clouds and honestly like, all of a sudden it clicked and I was like ‘Holy... I love him.’ It didn’t even scare me at that point, it was just so right. ... I do. I do love you.”

Luyendyk tells Kufrin that he loves her as well.

For a show that is supposedly about falling in love, this is unusual. Unless the lead says it to more than one contestant, “The Bachelor” does not show that moment because if the lead only says it to one person, then it spoils who wins in the end.

But Kufrin wasn’t the only person. Luyendyk also told Burnham he was in love with her during their date: “I do feel confident in all this because I love you.”

Bachelor Ben Higgins most recently did this on season 20 when he said “I love you” to both Lauren Bushnell and JoJo Fletcher before ultimately choosing Bushnell. Because it’s so uncommon, Kufrin said she was surprised he said it back.

“He just told me he loves me and I am shocked,” Kufrin said. “I did not think he would say it back, honestly. I want him to keep saying it over and over and over and over. ... I did not see that coming at all. I’m the happiest girl in the world right now.”

After their fantasy suite, Luyendyk seemed sold on Kufrin.

“I’m so in love with this girl,” Luyendyk said. “She is literally perfect. ... At this point, I don’t see my feelings changing for Becca. You know, I see us at the end of all this. I mean, there’s a part of me that wants to end this now and propose in the sand dunes.”

The ex encounter

However, Luyendyk wasn’t the only one sold on Kufrin. In a moment of dramatic irony and good editing, Kufrin says “nothing can get in the way at all” of her relationship with Luyendyk seconds before her ex-boyfriend, Ross Jirgl, steps into the scene.

Jirgl, who is a sports performance football coach at Stanford University, met Kufrin while they both attended Minnesota State University in Mankato. Kufrin has talked about Jirgl at multiple points throughout the show, as they were in an on-again-off-again relationship for seven years before things ended in 2016. Most notably, Kufrin said Jirgl had helped her get through the death of her father, which happened when she was 19 years old.

“I didn’t know anything about this show,” Jirgl said. “I didn’t know it ended in a proposal until someone told me and then I knew I had to do something. ... If I had to swim here, I’d do it. If I had to walk through this desert that I was walking through this morning, I’d do it. I’d climb every one of those sand dunes.”

Jirgl did not do any of that. Apparently, he just messaged producers and those affiliated with the show until someone agreed to fly him overnight to Peru, where he told Luyendyk that he was there to get Kufrin back.

“For as long as I thought about her, that’s my proposal to give her,” Jirgl said. “That’s the love of my life. I want to marry her. ... I just know what I’ve felt in my heart for the last seven years and the same thing still I feel to this day.”

And so, Jirgl decided on a grand romantic gesture which included a likely free trip to Peru, donning a suit he probably already owned and purchasing a bouquet of flowers, which weren’t even roses.

Obviously, Luyendyk does not love this recent development.

“It just pisses me off,” Luyendyk said. “The whole thing pissed me off. You broke up over a year ago and now you want to profess your love? It’s just the un-classiest. ... It’s a huge step to go from ‘we broke up a year ago, we haven’t talked in months’ to ‘I’m going to propose to her.’ I mean, what?”

After an awkward conversation, Jirgl heads off to meet with Kufrin and remind her of their relationship and the love they shared. He triumphantly knocks on her door, visions of Kufrin taking him back and the pair riding off into the sunset on white horses dancing in his head. Kufrin opens the door and...

“Hi. No,” Kufrin said. “Oh, my God. I can’t let you do this. No. Like, oh my f---- — God.”

It’s safe to bet that Jirgl expected this encounter to go differently.

“Clearly, you’re not excited to see me,” Jirgl said. The pair went to chat on the stairs. Jirgl attempted to hand Kufrin the flowers, before awkwardly placing them on the stair next to her.

“No matter where I go, or what I do, my head and my heart, they always come back to you and nobody compares to you,” Jirgl tells Kufrin, possibly hoping to salvage the situation. “The intention was to win your heart and do something big and let you know that like, nothing could stop me from getting to you or loving you. I wanted to marry you, Becca. That was my intention to come to you.”

Jirgl goes on, telling Kufrin that he knew they would work out in some miraculous way and that he thought they had love in their hearts still and that he knew they should be together.

“No!” Kufrin exclaims, burying her head in her hands. “I seriously cannot deal with this right now.”

But Kufrin wasn’t done there.

“This is like you inserting yourself into my life more and that’s not your place — it’s my relationship,” Kufrin said. “You don’t really know who I am anymore. I don’t know who you are. ... You can’t see that what we had wasn’t healthy for so damn long. ... I can’t go back to that. I don’t want to go back to that.”

Jirgl presumably returns home empty-handed, except for the thousands of Instagram followers gained after the episode aired. Kufrin heads to the rose ceremony, hoping that the surprise appearance hadn’t hurt her chances of walking out of the show with a ring on her finger and Luyendyk by her side.

It hadn’t. Luyendyk sent home Long, who he did not say “I love you” to (or at least it wasn’t shown) and who had not seemed sure of getting engaged so quickly.

Next week, Burnham and Kufrin will meet Luyendyk’s family and he will give his final rose and an engagement ring to one of the two on the finale of the season.

“I thought I was being very patient in this entire process and I’m starting to realize I’m not,” Kufrin said. “I just want to meet his family and just do this, but there’s so much time and questions still. I don’t know. I hate it. But I know that he loves me and so, it makes this all worthwhile.”