‘The Bachelorette’: Gabby Talks Next Plans With Erich, Reacts to His Controversial Texts (Exclusive)

Gabby Windey and Erich Schwer are ready for whatever the future holds. ET’s Rachel Smith spoke to the nurse on Wednesday, one day after her engagement to the real estate analyst was revealed on Tuesday night’s season finale of The Bachelorette, and Gabby shared the next steps she and her fiancé are taking in their relationship.

“We’re both in L.A., so it’s nice already to be in the same city,” Gabby tells ET. “I think we’re just excited to live life together, finally, and not have separate lives that we mesh like every couple weeks. We get to combine our lives and do things together.”

“I feel like that is our priority right now, is to just be with each other and enjoy the little things that we haven’t,” she adds, “and then all the moving in and stuff like that.”

Since getting engaged in May, Gabby says she and Erich have already learned a ton about each other.

“He’s really thoughtful,” she gushes. “We talked about love languages a lot and I think his are acts of service or gifts, which you can’t really show on the show. Now that we’re spending time outside of the show, I’m learning how he shows affection, which has been fun.”

While they’re happy and in love now, Gabby and Erich’s relationship wasn’t always easy. In fact, Erich questioned whether or not he’d be ready to pop the question just one day before the expected proposal.

He did end up doing just that, though, in incredibly romantic fashion as he called Gabby his “soulmate” before getting down on one knee.

Then, shortly before the finale aired, a woman who said she dated Erich before he went on the show came forward with texts from him, where he apparently wrote that he was “stuck in his career path” and wanted to go on the show to “see if there was something else I could do with my life.” 

In the texts, the woman asked Erich if he expected her to “continue dating you while you go on a reality TV show to ‘find love,'” to which he replied that the show “isn’t real.”

On Tuesday’s finale, Erich told host Jesse Palmer that the “cowardly” texts were him “using the show as an excuse to not confront her about our relationship at this point where I didn’t see a future but we were having fun.”

“We just had an honest conversation about it,” Gabby tells ET of the situation. “People go on the show for all different reasons. Of course his vocabulary and verbiage was pretty explicit and kind of concerning, but he didn’t know he was going to meet me. We didn’t know we were going to fall in love.”

Gabby also notes that Erich told her about the situation long before it became public.

“He told me pretty much right away because she started flaring up,” Gabby says. “[He said,] ‘I don’t know what this is going to be like or look like, but I want to let you know everything before you find out from somewhere else.'”

As for the message Erich sent the woman when he returned from filming and was engaged to Gabby — in which he said that he would “never forgive” himself for the situation, and telling her that she deserves “the best” — the nurse tells ET that she was aware of that too.

“He had let me know and then he reached out, I think trying to salvage whatever relationship he could to try and save his a** ‘cause she was already threatening to go to the media and stuff,” Gabby says. “Obviously it was unsuccessful, but boys are dumb.”

“It was just a really stupid thing to do. She was fired up. She has a right to be upset, so what she does with that information is her choice,” she adds. “… You can’t go back in the past and fix things, you just have to move forward.”

Despite the controversy, Gabby tells ET that she never thought it would be the end of her relationship with Erich.

“It was all before we met mostly and that’s fair game. I think we all do dumb things. We all have a past,” she says. “… Of course it was hard, but it was never make or break. He’s so good about it. He never gets defensive, he just always apologizes and admits to what he did wrong.”

All of the ups and downs, Gabby said, were worth it in her end now that she’s found her person.

“I wouldn’t change a thing,” she says. “No matter how hard it was to watch back. It was what we were feeling in the moment and just being true to ourselves. That’s, I think, all you can really ask for on a reality TV show.”

Tune in to Wednesday’s episode of Entertainment Tonight for more of ET’s coverage on The Bachelorette finale.

Relive all the drama from season 19 of The Bachelorette with ET’s coverage. For more Bachelor Nation fun, tune in to the season premiere of Bachelor in Paradise on Tuesday, Sept. 27 on ABC.