UPDATE: This story was originally published before the Nov. 5 episode of The Bachelorette.
Clare Crawley has made it no secret that she wants to skip forward several weeks, give Dale Moss her final rose, and enjoy the Bachelorette love story she’s waited for all year. In the Nov. 5 episode, she got her wish: Clare left the show with Dale after just three and a half episodes. Thanks to The Bachelorette’s strict confidentiality contract, Clare has kept quiet about her relationship status until now, and things can obviously change once couples leave the Bachelor bubble, but there are a lot of signs that Clare and Dale are still together. In fact, there's one big sign: Clare and Dale put everyone's worries to rest with a fleeting Instagram Live late Thursday night in which they cozied into frame together and confirmed that they are still together.
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Original article continues:
Early on in this season's fourth episode, we finally heard the words we’ve been waiting for — that Clare has “blown up The Bachelorette.” She said she wants to spend more time with Dale and, because it’s 2020 and anything goes, Chris Harrison sets them up on a one-on-one. What follows is an expedited Bachelorette season: at dinner, Clare tells Dale she loves him, and Dale tells her he’s falling in love, too. Cue the fantasy suite; cue another conversation with Chris Harrison. “Nothing compares to what I have with Dale, and I could most definitely, gladly spend the rest of my life with Dale,” she says in a confessional interview. She asked Chris Harrison what to do, and he told her the next step was a proposal. Okay!
Luckily, Dale was willing to roll with the punches. “From the moment I stepped out of the limo, I knew this was special,” he said, before proposing (and then accepting Clare’s final rose for real). It’s been a long week — at this very moment, Donald Trump is throwing around false, unfounded allegations of voter fraud on Twitter like Bachelorette contestants throw around rose emojis — and in the midst of chaos, at least we got to watch one happy ending unfold on TV.
But how has it worked out since then? Even though she hasn’t given a straight answer in any of her recent interviews, Clare has made it obvious that she’s happy with what she got out of the show — and, as she’s said more than once, she went on The Bachelorette to find love and only to find love. In a recent Zoom interview with Extra TV, former Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay asked Clare how Dale’s doing, and she just laughed. “You’ll have to ask Dale!” she said. “I can’t speak for anyone.”
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She was a little less vague in an October interview with Entertainment Tonight. When asked whether she is currently engaged, Clare just said that she is “very happy” — which seems to bode well, since she’s hinted twice on-screen that she hopes to make Dale her fiancé. “That feeling that I've never felt before... just standing in front of a man, connecting on that level, and it being electric between each other... I've never felt that instantly like that before,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “I had never felt it before, and I never even knew what to expect with those feelings. When you have not experienced it or felt it, you don't know if it exists, but when you feel it, you know exactly what that feeling is.” This doesn’t necessarily confirm anything, but it also doesn’t exactly sound like the way anyone would talk about their ex.
Bachelor Nation spoiler blogger Reality Steve hinted that, according to his unnamed, mysterious sources, Dale and Clare were still going strong as of September. “Do I know for a fact they're engaged? No. But I assume they are based on things I've heard,” he wrote in September. In October, another anonymous source told Life & Style that they are “still very much together and in love.”
The linchpin in the theory that Clare and Dale are still together, though? A ring. In October, Page Six shared photos of Clare walking around Sacramento, and fans quickly noticed what looked like an engagement ring on her hand. Shortly after, Clare tried to quiet the gossip on Instagram. “People have noticed I wear this ring on my wedding finger, and have asked why! The truth is because it is a commitment to myself first and foremost, to embody self-love,” she wrote. The explanation makes sense, but a few weeks later, Entertainment Tonight noticed Clare rocking a new, larger diamond ring, just ahead of her last episode this season. She hasn't explained that one yet.
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If the season’s first three episodes are any indication, Clare’s feelings for Dale are the real deal. “I definitely feel like I just met my husband. I’m shaking,” she said, after the couple exchanged just a few sentences and a hug on night one. To be fair, many people might have a similar reaction to this kind of moment after spending months in quarantine, but during last week’s episode, she went a step further, accidentally calling Dale her "fiancé" in a casual exchange with a producer. Chris Harrison joked to Entertainment Tonight that the comment was perhaps “a little presumptuous, maybe overly optimistic.”
We'll know the answer soon enough, but for now I'll leave you with this: In one of the season’s first previews, Clare made a pledge, saying “I promise you, this finger will be bare no more.” And the fact that she’s very happy right now seems to indicate that, in some shape or form, her dreams — however overly optimistic — came true.