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Why Did Bachelor in Paradise’s Joe Amabile and Kendall Long Split? A Look Back at Their Romance
What went wrong? Bachelor in Paradise couple Joe Amabile (a.k.a. Grocery Store Joe) and Kendall Long announced their split in January 2020. The couple met during season 5 of the reality dating show and even moved into an apartment in Los Angeles together in April 2019. Keep reading to find out why they ended things.
“We have decided mutually to go our separate ways. Joe has made the decision to move back to Chicago while Kendall will be remaining in her hometown of Los Angeles,” the couple said in a joint statement to BachelorNation.com. “Our family and friends have always been an extremely important element to who we are as people. We can’t imagine continuing our lives without them closer, especially when thinking of starting a family of our own one day.”
Joe was born and raised in the Chicago area while Kendall is a lifelong California babe. The Dancing With the Stars alum talked more about how deciding where they were going to reside became a major deal-breaker.
“Kendall had expressed to me that she would never want to live in Chicago. She just wouldn’t. She loves L.A. She doesn’t want to leave L.A. That’s her thing … I had a hard time with that because if I’m living [in L.A.], that compromise needs to be open,” Joe reflected on his “Click Bait” podcast with cohosts Tayshia Adams and Natasha Parker in December 2020.
That being said, Joe acknowledged that Kendall was always transparent with him about her future on the West Coast.
“She did express at the beginning of our relationship [that] she would never want to do it. In my head, I thought maybe that would change as time moved on. But she would just never want to live in Chicago,” he continued. “At the time, the way I looked at it was, what am I doing in L.A.? There was not really much for me to do there. I didn’t want to be the guy who was on a reality show living off of, ‘I was on The Bachelor a year ago. Look at me, yay.’ I needed something else.”
For her part, Kendall reflected on the “ultimatum” presented to her by Joe. “Either I move to Chicago or we break up, and I didn’t really wanna have a relationship like that,” she told Entertainment Tonight in March 2020.
In October 2020, the taxidermist told Us Weekly she and her ex have a “good relationship” and were working on being platonic friends.
“I think initially I was like, ‘This is gonna be easy. It’s going to be fine. We’re gonna be great friends.’ But it’s definitely difficult when you want to move on,” Kendall admitted about the change in their relationship. “You want to start to date and it’s not fair to keep holding onto somebody that you used to love and still have, like, a big place in your heart for, and I think we’re kind of learning how to be friends. I wouldn’t say we’re completely 100 percent there yet.”
