Instagram/Bekah Martinez
Congratulations are in order for Bekah Martinez!
The former Bachelor contestant who made headlines quite a bit throughout her time on Arie Luyendyk Jr.’s season of the reality dating series, is expecting her first child with boyfriend Grayston Leonard!
The 23-year-old shared the news in an interview with PureWow and with a video. “I was in disbelief and thought, ’Is this really happening?’” Martinez told the publication. “I immediately called Grayston and then went across the street to the Dollar Tree and bought two more pregnancy tests. They, of course, were both positive.”
Martinez first revealed she was dating Grayston earlier this year when many assumed she would be cast on Bachelor in Paradise‘s fifth season, but at that time she already knew she was pregnant.
Martinez added, “pregnancy is better than Bachelor in Paradise.”
“Although I’m probably equally as sweaty, exhausted, nauseous, stressed out and emotional, at least I don’t have to worry about finding a man,” she joked to the outlet. “I already have that one covered.”
While she competed on The Bachelor where the end goal is a proposal, Martinez said there aren’t necessarily wedding bells in her future just yet. “It’s the one thing that I’ve known with certainty for so long,” she explained. “I’ve gone back and forth on the idea of marriage and relationships, but I’ve always felt sure that I want to be a mom.”
Martinez got a lot of attention because of the more than 10-year age gap between herself and Luyendyk Jr. when she was on the season, but also afterward when her mother sent out a missing persons report following Bekah’s time on the show. As it turns out, it was just a big misunderstanding.
“I just decided to go to the mountains with my friends for a couple weeks [after filming The Bachelor] and I was there for six or seven days without phone service, which I thought I was going to have phone service and I told my mother that I would,” she told Jimmy Kimmel after the whole ordeal. “I just had this weird feeling on the sixth or seventh day. ‘I need to go home now.’ So, I got in my car, drove to where I had service, called my parents and then come to find out [that] only 12 hours before, my mother had called the Humboldt Sheriff’s Department saying that I was missing.”