Why did you want to go on the show?

"My brother was going to be on The Bachelorette about six years ago, but at the last minute, he bailed, because he got into a relationship. He was still friends with some of the casting directors and when I became single about a year ago, he was like, 'Hey, this is my brother, and he’s a radio DJ in Nashville, and I think he’d be great for the show.'

"I didn’t take it super-seriously at first. If nothing else, I thought I’d at least be able to tell the story about the time I auditioned for a reality TV show and didn’t get it, of course. But it became evident that they were going to have me on the show and it became really exciting. It’s a crazy adventure that less than 1,000 people have gotten to go on.

"I had dated in the traditional sense for the majority of my adult life and all of those relationships had been unfruitful, so why couldn’t this weird dating option work? It’s not a normal situation, but the normal situations were failing. I was like, If things work out okay, I’ll have a great story. If things work out good, I’ll have new guy friends. If things work out great, I’ll get to travel the world. And if things work out magically, I’ll be engaged at the end. It was all a positive. There was no con."

But you could have come off badly, though I don’t think you did.

"A lot of people think the show is edited [to depict contestants in specific ways], but it would be really hard to create something that didn’t happen, because there wouldn’t be dialogue to support it. It’s just compressed, not edited. 24 hours would be squashed into four minutes. Those things were said and people usually felt those things.

"My whole thing was, as long as I don’t do anything to make my mother not proud, then I’ll be fine. And I think I did that."

So many of the guys say they started off as skeptics and then it became real. Did it ever “become real” for you?

"I was probably the most skeptical of everyone. I was more of a victim of the circumstances, though. I was the last guy to get a one-on-one. If I had been Derek, who got the first one-on-one, I guarantee you my feelings would have been completely different. But I didn’t have a lot of time with JoJo. The whole not-kissing-her thing was a derivative of that, because I’d only spent a couple of minutes with her here and there and I didn’t want to waste time making out with her when I could be getting to know her and deciding whether I’m into her and, conversely, whether she’s into me.

"Robby told her he loved her on the first date! I thought that was crazy. But after that one-on-one when we finally did kiss and spent all day together, I was like, I’m 100% into this, I’m very attracted to this girl, I think this thing could have legs. Unfortunately, I was just too far behind, though I didn’t know that at the time. Watching it back, her relationships with other people were so much more evolved and complex than mine was. We started our relationship the day I got dumped in Argentina.

"I remember JoJo saying, 'You don’t ever kiss on the first date?' And I said, 'No, I don’t, ever.' And she said, 'We’ve been on six dates, Wells!' And I was like, 'No, we’ve hung out in a group setting six different times. This is our first date.'"