It’s been four days since Hayley Kiyoko revealed that she’s been in a relationship for four years when her girlfriend — former Bachelor contestant Becca Tilley — made a surprise cameo in her May 20 “For the Girls” music video. And now, Tilley is opening up about what the aftermath of coming out as bisexual and finally going public with her longterm romance has been like.
“I was prepared for anything and everything,” the 33-year-old host said on the latest episode of her podcast, Scrubbing In. “I was not prepared for the amount of love and support that we got. Like, I just could have never predicted.”
She went on to explain to her co-host, Tanya Rad, how nervous she felt about the idea of opening her sexuality and love life up to criticism by going public in the music video — Kiyoko’s lesbian take on the Bachelorette franchise — as well as on Instagram. “Hayley has really made me feel brave,” she told Rad. “And she was always like, ‘People are gonna love you, people love you, and they want to see you happy.'”
“How amazing that so many people in [our] life knew, and this never got out,” she continued. “The level of respect that that takes for people to keep something like that to themselves and not out us was pretty incredible. A lot of people knew.”
Though Tilley said she and Kiyoko weren’t necessarily keeping their relationship fully secret in the time period leading up to their reveal. “I think it’s time,” she said of making their relationship public. “For four years, it’s been our relationship.” She also shared that they weren’t trying to keep the relationship secret, and in fact, they often held hands and kissed in public, though and Tilley close circle did work to keep it as private as possible. This proved challenging on their podcast, on which the reality star lamented about how hard it was to talk abstractly about her love interest without giving away the gender.
“The pronoun thing was so stressful,” she laughed through tears. “I would have to reformulate sentences in my head before I said them!”
Tilley also explained how quickly she and the “Girls Like Girls” singer sparked a connection, kissing for the first time after going out with friends. “We fell in love so fast,” she reminisced. “When I met Hayley, that was the first time I had [feelings] specifically for a woman. It was so magnetic that I never questioned who she was. I fell in love with this person, someone’s soul and their heart. I never had to overthink that part until I started thinking about coming out publicly.”
Listen to Becca Tilley talk about her relationship reveal with Hayley Kiyoko on her podcast below: