Arie Luyendyk Jr. is getting really good at this apology thing.
The unpopular Bachelor star has been issuing mea culpas for weeks, it seems, ever since he shattered Becca Kufrin’s heart on national television to wrap up the latest season of this ABC reality show.
This time around, however, Arie did not blindside his fiancee with a break-up speech in front of network cameras.
Instead, he teamed up with his second fiancee to pull a lame, unoriginal and, according to some, offensive prank on Twitter followers this past Sunday.
In honor of April Fool’s Day, Arie and Lauren Burnham set out to play a joke on their shrinking number of fans.
Luyendyk shared a photo of someone’s baby bump, implied it belonged to Lauren and Tweeted:
“Secrets finally out, we have a bunny in the oven! @laurenburnham91.”
Take a look below at the picture that accompanied this caption:
Just over an hour after uploading this image, Arie copped to the ploy, simply writing “APRIL FOOLS” and likely thinking he was the funniest person on the planet.
But many people out there disagreed.
Because infertility is sadly a common problem in America, a handful of critics on the Internet did not think this was a topic to base a joke around.
There are millions of women who would give absolutely anything to actually have a bun in their oven…and here is Arie, just having a grand ole time at their expense.
So the argument by quite a few social media users went, with one person referring to Lauren and Arie as “disgusting” and others adding:
“You really are a douche canoe if this is an April fools [sic]!!” wrote another displeased commenter.
(Editor’s Note: Based on the way Arie treated Becca, many would say he’s a douche canoe regardless of this prank. But we digress.)
After initially blowing off the backlash, Luyendyk later jumped back on Twitter yesterday and recognized that he messed up, writing:
I do have sympathy for women struggling from infertility. My April Fools prank was in no way meant to offend women who struggle with that.
I apologize if you were effected personally by my post.
That’s probably enough now, right?
We understand why this is a very personal and sensitive issue for folks out there, but we don’t doubt Arie and Lauren meant no harm by their joke.
They’ve hopefully learned some kind of lesson and should probably err on the side of being as sensitive as possible in general, considering how they’re viewed by most Bachelor viewers after the finale.
Maybe take a social media hiatus, guys.
There’s little good that can be done by you making your presence felt strongly in the public sphere these days.
We could all use a cooling off period from these two, no matter what you think of their pregnancy prank, couldn’t we?
