Getty Cassie Randolph and Colton Underwood
As ABC premieres the newest season of The Bachelorette starring Hannah Brown, viewers can’t help but wonder about the current relationship status of the man who rejected the former pageant queen during Season 23 of The Bachelor, Colton Underwood. The aspiring football player jumped a fence to keep contestant Cassie Randolph as his love interest, and while the season didn’t end with him getting down on one knee, have the two since become engaged?
While Cassie and Colton are still going strong as a couple, defying the expectations of most viewers, who believed that the speech pathologist from Southern California just wasn’t that into Colton, the two are not yet engaged. And while they both moved to Los Angeles to be closer to one another, they didn’t move in together. It’s an odd situation choice that closely mirrors how his season of The Bachelor ended in the first place, with Colton bending any which way to make Cassie feel comfortable with their relationship, and defending his actions with reasoning that don’t quite make sense.
Colton recently told Extra, “We both feel like… living our separate lives but still coming together at the end of the day is what’s most important for us and what’s the right step for where we’re at in our relationship. [With] any normal couple, you have conversations that [are] sort of what’s next. But right now we’re enjoying dating, we’re enjoying getting to know each other more, we’re getting to find out more about each other.”
Right, okay. It’s hard for Colton’s explanation to not sound like code for “Let’s move to the city where we can get the highest exposure for our relationship, but live in separate apartments so it will make things easier for when we eventually break up.” Not hating, just calling it like we see it.
Making the situation even stranger, Cassie moved to live two floors away from Colton’s former Bachelor love interest, who somehow became her best friend IRL, Caeylnn Miller-Keyes.
While talking with Cosmopolitan Miller-Keyes said, “People are taken aback and weirded out by that, but our relationship has truly changed. He’s always giving me advice, setting me up on dates. It’s so fun [living so close to Cassie]. When we need outfit help, we run up or run down — share clothes. It feels like we’re on The Bachelor again. It’s a mini Bachelor mansion.”
While Colton said, “We are trying to do everything as normal as possible,” this Three’s Company situation is far from anything resembling normal. But Colton keeps the excuses coming. “Statistically speaking, for Bachelors, it’s not very good odds, so I think us going against what other Bachelor and Bachelorette couples have done is probably going to work out in our favor.”
READ NEXT: Colton Underwood’s Plans After ‘The Bachelor’: What Will He Do?