Breaking her silence! The Bachelorette’s Tayshia Adams is speaking out after calling off her engagement from fiancé Zac Clark, nearly one year after the proposal aired.
During the Monday, December 6, episode of The Bachelorette: The Men Tell All, cohost Kaitlyn Bristowe noted that Adams, 31, isn’t wearing her engagement ring.
“All I have to say is that I’m heartbroken. But we tried really hard and I still love him very much and I’m not sure what the future holds,” the season 16 Bachelorette shared. “You know how it is, it’s really tough.”
The Dancing With the Stars winner, 36, replied, “I sadly do know how it is, it’s really hard, but we’re here for you and obviously want you to be happy.”
After the duo hug, they welcome Rodney Mathews onto the stage. However, Adams gets up while he’s talking and exits the stage. “We’re gonna let Tayshia have a minute,” Bristowe told the cameras. She later came back out and rejoined the show.
Us Weekly confirmed on November 22 that the reality show pair had split. “Tayshia Adams and Zac Clark are no longer a couple,” a rep told Us at the time. The news came three days after Life & Style reported that they were on a break.
Due to their busy schedules, “they eventually realized it wasn’t going to work and their relationship ran its course,” a source exclusively told Us, noting that the duo hadn’t “even started wedding planning” before calling it quits.
The insider noted that there was still a lot of “love” between Clark, 37, and Adams and it would be “a hard breakup for the two of them.”
The former couple, who met during season 16 of the ABC reality series in 2020, sparked split speculation days before pulling the plug on their relationship after Adams was spotted without her engagement ring while taping two “Bachelor Happy Hour” podcast episodes.
She continued to fuel breakup rumors when she shared a cryptic message via Twitter. “Trust the process…,” the former phlebotomist wrote on November 15. The following day, the TV personality was again seen without her ring while attending the House of Gucci premiere solo in New York City.
Several days later, Adams “liked” a post on an Instagram page that read, “Finally, I realized that I was never asking for too much. I was just asking the wrong person.”
Two weeks before ending things, the twosome ran the New York City Marathon together on November 7. Following the event, Clark gushed over Adam’s ability to push through adversity.
“I will be forever grateful to have had a front row seat to her performance yesterday, as will the thousands of others who cheered her along the way,” the addiction specialist wrote via Instagram on November 8. “The world is a better place today than it was yesterday because of you.”
Nearly one year earlier, Bachelor Nation was rooting for Adams to give Clark her final rose after she replaced Clare Crawley during season 16 of the ABC show. (Crawley, 40, got engaged to Dale Moss within the first two weeks of production and left the show. In September, Us confirmed that the on-off couple called it quits for good.)
Clark’s sweet proposal during the December 2020 Bachelorette finale became one of the more unforgettable moments in the series. “I came here because I was supposed to be here, and I came here because I was supposed to fall in love with you,” he said during his speech. “Nothing has felt so right my entire life. You’ve helped me experience the love I didn’t know existed … I love you because you are a strong, independent woman, who makes everyone better. I love you because you believe in me.”
However, the following year, Adams talked to Us about the pressure that came with falling in love on TV.
“It’s so funny because people do have lives outside of social media,” the “Clickbait” podcast host said in June. “And it’s so amazing to have the love and support of Bachelor Nation. Because to be honest with you, we go through it kind of together when we’re all watching the show. However, you have to realize that it’s a real relationship behind the scenes.”