Zac was in tears in Sunday night’s episode of Farmer Wants A Wife as he sent Grace home at the black-tie dinner, leaving Maya and Mieke as his final two. As for Grace, who’d scored the first 24-hour date with 24-year-old Zac at his apple farm, way back at the start, she was left feeling “confused, shocked and numb”.
“Leading up to that night, I had been promised more time, another date, things I realised in that moment I was never going to get,” she tells TV WEEK. “I just felt like we had been cut short before we even had a chance. It was really disappointing and sad.”
As for those tears of Zac’s, Grace says she “couldn’t compute” what Zac was saying with how he was acting.
“If sending me home was making him so upset, then why was he doing it?” she remembers thinking. “Looking back, I know that hurting my feelings is what made him so upset.”
Grace, a 25-year-old environmental scientist, says that first 24-hour date with Zac was “better than I could have hoped for”, and the rest of that first week or so was “still really great”.
“The girls who were getting dates kept going home, so I still felt confident in our connection,” Grace explains. “We had lots of cute moments around the house, I felt really reassured, and he kept telling me how excited he was for our next date. Obviously once he started connecting more with Maya and Mieke, without spending any time with me, it was definitely hard to watch.
“It’s a really delicate environment mentally, trying to stay confident without comparing yourself to the other girls, who are also your only friends and confidants. I struggled a fair bit when I realised our connection was losing momentum.”
Filming finished months ago, so what’s Grace been up to since then?
“It took me a while to come to peace with what happened on the show and the way it ended,” she admits. “I’m so lucky to have all the incredible people in my life who helped me through that period. I’m back to the regular now, playing footy and still hanging in Mackay, with the added bonus of some amazing new mates in my life from the show. Still waiting for a second date…”
Catch Farmer Wants A Wife on Monday at 7.30pm and Sunday at 7pm on Channel Seven or 7plus.
