Last month, The Bachelor: Vietnam contestant Minh Thu confessed her love for fellow contestant Truc Nhu. Thu asked Nhu to leave the show with her, saying “Come home with me.” This interaction went internationally viral, and although the two women walked off the show together onscreen, Nhu had a heart-to-heart conversation with the bachelor Nguyen Quoc Trung and chose to remain on the show.
According to an interview with executive producer Anh Tran in Nextshark, the two women recently began dating. “They left the show and have been together since. We delivered on our promise that two people would find love,” said Anh Tran.
The pair confirmed their relationship in an interview with the show last week. “The moment when Minh Thu left and I stayed behind, I had a lot of longing. I had a lot of memories of our time together,” Nhu told BuzzFeed News. Neither of the women has been in a same-sex relationship before this one and found coming out on television in such a public way to be challenging. They both had to figure out how to tell their friends and family before the episode aired and they want people to support them as a couple.
Thu said in an interview with Vice, “In the second episode, Truc Nhu was in the bottom two and she was the last one whose name was called, so I got really emotional because I was scared that she was going to go home. That was when I started to realize we had feelings for each other. In episode three, I got freaked out, and behind the camera I started crying because I was afraid Truc Nhu would be going home. I asked myself, ‘Why was I crying so much in this situation? Why do I care so much for this girl?'”
Nhu said about the onscreen moment from the rose ceremony, “I didn’t have much motivation to stay anymore. Yeah, I wanted to go home with her. It was just that simple.”
Anh-Thu Nguyen, one of the show’s producers, explained the impact of Thu’s and Nhu’s moment: “As both a queer Vietnamese-American woman and as someone involved in the show who witnessed this first hand, this was a moving and powerful moment showcasing that love is love.”
She said, “Especially in the context of Vietnamese culture, where family and saving face can often be prioritized over all else, including love, the fact these women made this declaration during the rose ceremony in front of everyone is even more awe-inspiring. It’s been a proud experience to see our clip resonate around the world and become an unexpected platform for discussing LGBTQI+ issues in Vietnam on a global scale.”
Nhu said in an interview with Vice, “I’m looking forward to a day in the future where local Vietnamese people would have a more open mind to really support us, and let us be ourselves.”
Minh Thu and Truc Nhu are not the first women to start a romantic relationship with each other after leaving The Bachelor, either, according to The Muse. In 2016, on the Bachelor: Australia, two contestants named Megan Marx and Tiffany Scanlon fell in love and started dating.
Image via The Bachelor: Vietnam and BuzzFeed News
