Jenn Tran’s Bachelorette journey will be one-of-a-kind.
“This season definitely breaks the mold in a lot of different ways,” Jenn, 26, exclusively told Us Weekly. “I never saw myself as the Bachelorette because, for me, the Bachelorette [is] someone who’s so confident, so poised, is articulate, can emotionally emote and can be vulnerable. I just didn’t know if I could do all that.”
She continued, “I never saw myself as a main character [and] I never saw myself as someone with that much confidence, and so what I really learned is that it’s not about fitting a mold of the Bachelorette. It’s about being able to just be yourself the best that you can, and that’s really what my whole journey is about — me being myself and embracing all of my flaws and everything that makes me unique.”
Jenn first appeared on Joey Graziadei’s season 28 of The Bachelor, which aired on ABC earlier this year. Joey, 28, eliminated Jenn before hometowns and ultimately proposed to finalist Kelsey Anderson. Jenn was announced as the next Bachelorette during March’s After the Final Rose special.
Jenn believes her Bachelorette season, which premieres next month, ended up being successful regardless of whether she met The One.
“It was a journey that was filled with a lot of growth in terms of self-love,” Jenn told Us, stressing she was focused on “learning and growing more” within herself.
Overall, Jenn found that she “learned so much” introspectively.
“The biggest thing that I think that I look back on is I never really had a voice in a relationship,” Jenn said. “I always felt like I had to please the other person and kind of just roll over and let them walk all over me sometimes just because I was scared to speak up about certain things. And so throughout this journey, I really wanted to focus on [myself] and what I wanted and what I needed in a relationship. I needed to find people who allowed me to have a voice and embrace that and gave me a platform for that. I really learned how to have that confidence in speaking up for myself.”
Throughout the season, Jenn focused on accepting herself and being present with each of the 25 men — and she wanted her suitors to do the same.
“[Since] I’m the first Asian American Bachelorette, you’re going to be seeing a lot of me having conversations with these men about what that means to me and what my culture means to me,” Jenn said. “Things like that is really what I learned to embrace throughout the journey, and I’m so excited for people to see that and to see themselves reflected in that.”
While Jenn did not spoil how her season ends, the final result did catch her off-guard.
“I truly was on the edge of my seat every day,” she quipped. “I was like, ‘Something new is happening,’ and I was just constantly surprised. So, I would say the journey itself included a lot of twists and turns that I was surprised by — including the ending.”
That being said, Jenn is “very happy” with how her season played out.
“I can say that I definitely opened my heart up to a lot of different connections and explored a lot of these,” she added. “The way that things panned out throughout the journey and the way that things ended, I’m very happy about [it].”
The Bachelorette season 21 premieres on ABC Monday, July 8, at 8 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
