As he gears up for his return to television, Colton Underwood is happily in the throes of a new relationship.
The former “Bachelor” star confirmed this week that he’s been dating boyfriend Jordan C. Brown for several months.
“I wasn’t really pursuing dating at first,” Underwood told People magazine in an interview published Thursday. “But since then I found somebody and I am very much in love.” Describing his beau as “a great support,” he added, “I’m the luckiest person to have him in my life.”
In a separate interview with The New York Times, Underwood didn’t divulge further details but said the couple’s families had met. “The easiest way for me to say it is that it was like me bringing a girl home,” he said. “Like, nobody batted an eye.”
Brown, who is based in Los Angeles, is a political strategist who worked on former President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns and collaborated on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
He and Underwood were first romantically linked in September, when the pair was spotted vacationing in Hawaii and in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Last month, they attended the 2021 Baby2Baby Gala together in Los Angeles.
Though it’s not clear how the two men were introduced, they appear to share a number of mutual friends, including Olympian Gus Kenworthy.
Underwood returns to TV this week in Netflix’s “Coming Out Colton,” a six-episode series that documents his journey to living authentically as a gay man.
The show, which debuts Friday, has been met with controversy. Some viewers have blasted Underwood, who revealed he was gay in April, for “monetizing” the process of coming out. Others were angered by Netflix’s decision to seemingly lionize Underwood, who in 2020 was accused of stalking his ex-girlfriend, “Bachelor” star Cassie Randolph, and hit with a restraining order.
According to early reviews, “Coming Out Colton” doesn’t shy away from Underwood’s public split with Randolph. And in a chat with Us Weekly published on Wednesday, Underwood said the media frenzy surrounding his love life had convinced him it’s best to keep his relationship with Brown mostly under wraps for now.
“I’ve definitely drawn boundaries on that,” he said. “Having a public relationship, for me, was not healthy. I just think right now I’m really sort of protecting and guarding what I have. I just want that time for us.”