Bachelor Winter Games' Clare Crawley and Benoit Are Engaged! Inside His Shocking Proposal
Fourth time’s the charm for Bachelor Nation’s Clare Crawley — she’s engaged!
During The Bachelor Winter Games: World Tells All special on Thursday night, Canada native Benoit Beauséjour-Savard got down on one knee to pop the question in French, and she said, “Yes!”
“It’s overwhelming, it’s crazy,” Crawley tells PEOPLE of the surprise engagement. “Going on these Bachelor shows is a huge risk and you don’t know the outcome. It’s scary, but it’s a risk that you have to take to get the good in the end.”
“I dind’t expect this,” Beauséjour-Savard adds. “I was heartbroken on The Bachelorette: Canada but going back on this show I had an open mind. I was realistic that there might not be someone for me. But like you’ve seen on TV, I had the biggest crush ever on her. [But then] it wasn’t a crush, it was developing into something really deep and strong.”
The pair connected early on during their time on the spinoff show, but Crawley soon found herself in a love triangle with Beauséjour-Savard and German contestant Christian Rauch. While Beauséjour-Savard was open about his intense feelings for Crawley, she ended up telling him that she didn’t feel the same way and wanted to get to know Rauch better.
Beauséjour-Savard was heartbroken and decided to leave the house, but things didn’t quite work out in the end for Crawley and Rauch, either: They chose to go their separate ways before a kissing competition.
Crawley and Beauséjour-Savard then reconnected over a simple text in which he asked if she was doing okay after leaving the show.
“At that point, I was just thinking, ‘She’s ending up with Christian,'” Beauséjour-Savard says. “The sentence that kept running through my mind was, ‘It’s not the end of the two of us.’ But I knew at that moment that she may have fell for him. It didn’t happen, so she just called me and from there, it went better and better, and we spent hours and hours each and every day talking to each other.”
The Winter Games teased the proposal before the show aired by posting a photo of Crawley’s engagement ring on Twitter, though ABC kept the identity of the betrothed pair a secret, even suggesting Dean Unglert had asked Lesley Murphy to marry him in a promo.
Beauséjour-Savard says Neil Lane custom-designed the sparkler, which Lane told us all about (with exclusive photos) here.
“He didn’t have the one I was looking for, so he built a custom one, which is amazing,” he says. “It was exactly what I asked, and he did the best job ever. It blows my mind. It was the first time that I had to shop for this, and it will be the last one for sure. It’s kind of stressful, but I’m glad she likes it.”
Beauséjour-Savard says he only started thinking about the proposal a week before he popped the question, and though he hadn’t told his family beforehand, he asked Crawley’s family for their blessing over FaceTime.
“They’re really close to each other and mostly women,” he says. “I think to have another man in their life, they were wishing that to happen for Clare. It’s just the best thing right now.”
He continues: “We’re two sensitive people, two intense people. Go big or home. I love her so much, you have no idea, and she’s just the best so, why not? I wanted to.”
Je n’avais jamais pensé représenter mon pays dans une quelconque compétition sportive ]]>😅🙌🏼
