Personal Life
Rycroft was briefly engaged to Jason Mesnick, whom she met on The Bachelor. Mesnick called the engagement off after he admitted he was still in love with runner-up, Molly Malaney. Rycroft and Mesnick also explained that the relationship was strained and entirely different off camera. Emotionally shattered, returned to Tye Strickland, whom she had had a casual relationship on and off with for a number of years. Rycroft later admitted in her memoir that she had always been in love with Tye Strickland, and only was prompted to appear on Bachelor by Strickland's repeated rejections of her pleas for a more committed relationship. Furthermore, Rycroft explained that the Bachelor show was set up to disorient participants, creating a pseudo reality where beautiful surroundings, glamour, and vacation settings serve to make women fall haplessly in love with the bachelor. Rycroft coined this condition as "The Bachelor Bubble." In June 2009 she announced via Twitter that she and Strickland were engaged. They married on December 12, 2009, in Mexico.
On October 20, 2010, Rycroft announced on CBS's The Talk that she was pregnant and was having a baby girl. On February 16, 2011, she gave birth to the couple's first child, daughter Ava Grace Strickland.It seemed that Melissa Rycroft had finally found her own fairly tale ending. But it was not to be so, when Rycroft reluctantly revealed she had been suffering from a particularly painful case of post partum beginning almost immediately after Ava Grace's birth. Rycroft made headlines again when she revealed she was under physicians' care for the ailment. Rycroft explained that she had taken pains to hide her condition from everyone except for Ava's father, due to an unwillingness at ever being "compared to Andrea Yates." Rycroft was adamant that she not be compared to Yates, and said the distinction between herself and "woman like Yates" was that Rycroft "never wanted to hurt her child." Rycroft further explained that in her depression, she felt a great "emptiness," and that "nothing was cause for happiness any longer." Rycroft declines further discussion on her PPD, and simply explains she is in recovery.
Read more about this topic: Melissa Rycroft
Famous quotes related to personal life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)