People don’t usually admit they feel unlovable. They don’t admit they feel like outsiders. They don’t admit they’ve built whole personalities around trying to look fine while quietly wondering what’s wrong with them.
Ben Higgins said it out loud — on national television.
Before he launched companies, wrote a book or became a voice in the faith-and-culture space, Higgins was the lead on The Bachelor, the guy America watched fall in love under perfect lighting. But behind the production, he carried something he’d held since childhood: the quiet suspicion that who he really was might not be enough.
“I’ve consistently felt like the kid looking through the window at the party I wasn’t invited to,” he says. “I always felt different. Weird.”
He grew up an only child around adults, which made childhood feel uncomplicated and adulthood feel brutal. He thought everyone was automatically close to him because he didn’t know what distance was. When he finally hit the age where people had circles and hierarchies and rooms you couldn’t just walk into, the correction was sharp. He didn’t have the language then, but what he felt was disconnection — and the shame that comes with it.
It followed him onto The Bachelorette, where he landed in a mansion full of men who looked invincible: athletes, trainers, executives. Higgins, by comparison, saw himself as “a software salesman making pretty much minimum wage,” a guy who didn’t expect to stand out. “I felt very, very inadequate,” he says.
He stayed quiet for weeks.
Until someone finally noticed.
A producer pulled him aside and told him, bluntly, “Ben, I don’t like you.” Higgins was stunned. Then the producer explained he didn’t dislike who Ben was — he disliked that Ben wasn’t letting anyone know him. The silence wasn’t mysterious. It was a wall.
“That hit me hard,” Higgins says. And for the first time in his adult life, he said the thing he never wanted to admit: “I think one of the big reasons I stay silent is because I have this internal fear that the more people get to know me, the less they will like me.” Then he said the line that would later air to millions: “In a lot of ways, I feel unlovable.”
He didn’t expect the world to hear it. He expected to regret it. Instead, the opposite happened.
“The response was insane,” he says. “Thousands of people reaching out saying, I feel this way also.”
For the first time, the thing he feared would push people away brought them closer. And it woke something up in him. He started journaling on set — not recaps of dates or behind-the-scenes gossip, but reflections on longing, insecurity and the strange way vulnerability opened doors he’d spent his life standing outside.
“Our pains or our insecurities might connect us more than our joys and successes,” he wrote, a realization that became the heartbeat of Alone in Plain Sight, the book he eventually published.
But the book didn’t just come from his own story. Higgins interviewed people whose lives carried a different weight entirely, including a young woman with cystic fibrosis who had been denied another lung transplant and knew she had only weeks left to live. She gave him 90 minutes of her remaining life.
“That felt like one of the greatest gifts but also one of the heaviest,” he says. “That somebody would say, hey, I’ve got three weeks left, I’ll give you an hour and a half.” Her father later told him, “When somebody asks about my daughter, I hand them your book.” The sentence still stops him.
The deeper he went into other people’s stories, the more convinced he became that connection isn’t sentimental. It’s essential. And almost everyone is starving for it.
After the show, he briefly tried to play the celebrity game. He went to parties, chased relevancy, said yes to everything. “I was running the race of relevancy,” he says. But a longtime friend finally called him out. Higgins remembers bragging about the people he had been hanging out with when his friend interrupted him and said, “When you became the Bachelor, my prayer was that this would never become about you.” He told Higgins to use the platform to elevate the things he already cared about, not to reinvent himself as a brand.
“It shook me,” Higgins says. “But it also felt very freeing.”
He stepped off the treadmill. He went back to his old job because he needed health insurance. He co-founded Generous Coffee, a company that donates 100 percent of profits. He intentionally built things that didn’t rely on his name. “I didn’t want the pressure to stay relevant,” he says.
That instinct shapes his work today. Higgins is helping develop iHeart’s emerging faith division, a project rooted in real conversations instead of curated performances. A mentor, author Mike Foster, told him he’s a “bridge builder,” someone who can sit between faith and mainstream culture and help them meet in the middle. “That I can bring the two together in a way that’s attractive for both,” Higgins remembers. The description stuck because it finally named what he’d always hoped was true.
Connection isn’t a concept for him anymore. It’s a practice. It’s hospitality. It’s choosing to invest in experiences that pull people into the same room instead of the same algorithm. “Hospitality is such a piece of my family,” he says. Sharing meals, sharing space, sharing moments — he sees those as antidotes to a culture that keeps drifting toward digital distance. And he’s drawn to industries AI can’t replace: “Food, water, shelter, experiences, things that bring people together.”
At home, connection looks like something quieter. He talks about wanting to listen more than he speaks with his daughter, wanting her to know he’s not perfect or invincible, wanting her to feel safe telling him the things he spent years hiding. “I want them to know I’m not Superman,” he says. “But goodness gracious, I love them.”
Higgins doesn’t pretend he solved loneliness. He talks about it the way you talk about a scar — something that will always be part of the story but no longer runs the show. And he’s learned to see the insecurity he once despised as something that can draw people toward him rather than away.
“The thing that made me feel like an outsider might be the thing that connects me to people,” he says.
The kid staring through the window may still exist somewhere inside him, but he isn’t alone anymore. He’s learned how to walk inside. And he’s working hard to keep the door open for everyone who feels the same way.
Check out our conversation with Ben Higgins on The RELEVANT Podcast Impact Series, presented by World Vision, or listen here:
