Clare Crawley: Why My Mom ‘Wasn’t Able’ Attend to My Wedding to Ryan

A change in plans. Clare Crawley and her husband, Ryan Dawkins, planned to hold two wedding ceremonies but several factors got in the way.

“I wanted to get married in Mexico. We both found this spot in Mexico. We were like, ‘This is our spot. We’re going to have this big celebration,’” the former Bachelorette, 42, recalled during an appearance on “Most Dramatic Podcast Ever With Chris Harrison” on Thursday, May 25, episode. “I’d been waiting forever to get married.”

She added: “I always wanted to get married on June 21. It’s [the] summer solstice. I was like, ‘What if she doesn’t make it to June 21?’ She ended up getting really sick [in the] end of January. And so I said, ‘Let’s have a mini little wedding because she won’t be able to make it to Mexico anyway. A little mini wedding just for her. A special little one for us, for her.’”

Crawley’s mother, Lilia, had previously been diagnosed with dementia, which took a turn for the worse amid her wedding plans. As a result, the couple decided to hold an intimate ceremony with just her mother and Dawkins’ two daughters from a previous relationship as witnesses.

“We wanted to make it tiny. Everybody [else] was going to come to the big wedding,” the hairstylist emotionally recalled to host Chris Harrison. “But my mom ended up getting really, really sick the day before. She wasn’t able to make it. She’s OK still, but she was just really sick at the time and couldn’t leave the nursing home.”

The couple ultimately decided to go ahead with their scheduled plans, tying the knot in February.

“Ryan, by nature, is an event planner, so he planned the whole wedding. I was kind of frozen with, ‘What do we do?’ It was very last-minute stuff and I was so worried about my mom,” Crawley added on Thursday. “But he took the reins, he planned everything.”

She continued: “We had a little ceremony. We had the best vows to each other, super personal. It was in the spot [where] we had our first kiss. It was just the greatest little spot.”

The twosome, who got engaged at the RISE Festival in October 2022, confirmed one month earlier that they had started first connected in 2021.

“I wasn’t ready to date again,” The Bachelor Winter Games alum exclusively told Us Weekly in October 2022 of meeting her now-spouse. “The second that I was single he was like, ‘Let me take you out.’ And he knew that I was in such a low point and I told him I wasn’t even ready to go out to dinner.”

She added at the time: “I needed to take the space to have time to myself to heal. I didn’t want him to be a rebound.”

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Prior to falling in love with the Mascot Sports CEO, Crawley was briefly engaged to Benoit Beauséjour-Savard after meeting on Winter Games in 2018. After the relationship fizzled, she led The Bachelorette season 16 and instantly hit it off with Dale Moss. The former football player, 34, proposed after just 12 days and they left the show early. The now-exes were together on and off until splitting for good in September 2021.