Season 17 of The Bachelorette with Katie Thurston just began this Monday, and it's already shaping up to be a season filled with laughs, gags, love, and plenty of tears, and those in Bachelor Nation would expect nothing less. While the journey to potentially find Katie's forever love has just started on television, she's is actually done with filming on her season, and is starting to gather some perspective on what it means to be the lead of the franchise. As such, she's now offered some advice to the Season 18 Bachelorette, Michelle Young.
For the first time ever, two Bachelorette's were chosen at once and each given their own season of the franchise, with Michelle's season also airing this year in another first for the franchise. Katie and Michelle were both first seen on Season 25 of The Bachelor earlier this year, but now that Katie has had the experience of being the lead, she's given some solid advice to Michelle, who'll begin filming her season in a few weeks.
In a chat with Variety, after being asked what she would tell Michelle about being the Bachelorette, Katie said:
It was something I had to learn, as well, which is [to] trust the process, let go of control and remember what the focus is, which is who your one-and-only is. That was hard for me because there was more than one guy that I saw something with.
From the outset, this might seem like basic advice that anyone who appears on any of the Bachelor franchise shows would know, but I can imagine that, regardless of what you want to do going into the situation, it might be hard to remember all of that once you have 30 eligible bachelors thrown at you and you have to start trying to get to know them. As Katie noted earlier in her interview, the news was announced before she'd been fully released from her duties on The Bachelor, so she still didn't have her phone. She wasn't able to get advice from anyone about how to handle being the lead until much later.
Former Bachelorettes Tayshia Adams and Kaitlyn Bristowe are our hosts for Season 17, and Katie has said that she was glad they were there to offer guidance to her during the process. Being the lead is a lot of pressure, and comes with the responsibility of trying to find someone you connect with enough to become engaged to that person, but, from what Katie said in her interview (and, honestly from what we see every season) it's tricky to hone in on that when you have so many good options who are (mostly) all doing their damnedest to win your heart.
If the potential spoilers are true, the process may have worked out well for Katie, so, hopefully, we can say the same for Michelle in a few months time. Katie Thurston's Season 17 of The Bachelorette airs Mondays, on ABC, at 8 p.m. EST, and Michelle Young's Season 18 is expected to begin at some point in the fall. In the meantime, check out our guide to 2021 summer TV premieres!
