The future of their family! Ben Higgins and Jessica Clarke eventually want to adopt children, the former Bachelor exclusively told Us Weekly.
“Jess and I are very interested in adopting. … It would be such a gift to our family,” the “Ben & Ashley I Almost Famous Podcast” cohost, 31, revealed on Thursday, June 18, while promoting his partnership with jewelry company Jared. “I definitely am excited about the idea of adopting, so if that means that we have two adopted kids, if that means we have three adopted kids, if that means we have kids that are biologically ours, I don’t know yet, but we definitely want a family.”
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While the Colorado native would “love to have two kids,” his fiancée, 25, “comes from a family of three siblings.”
The Bachelorette alum explained that he doesn’t “want a massive family” because he’s a “pretty big introvert.” Higgins told Us, “I really do enjoy my time alone. A huge family of chaos kind of makes me anxious, but I do want our kids to have siblings, if possible, to grow up in this world with.”
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Ben Higgins and Marc Lupo
The couple, who got engaged in March, don’t have an “exact timeline” for their future family plans. Higgins guesses “in a year and a half to two and a half years, [they] would start the process and try to figure out what the situation is going to look like.”
He added, “Right now, I’m not even in support of getting a dog because I want freedom. So, kids would … probably come after she gets her puppy.”
The couple became Instagram official in February 2019, a few months after the former ABC personality slid into Clarke’s DMs. “Our relationship is healthy,” he told Us exclusively in January. “I’m a better version of myself, a more free version of myself than I’ve been in a while.”
While the pair plan their wedding, couples can enter for a chance to have Higgins officiate their own nuptials via Jared’s virtual platform with entries accepted through Monday, June 22.
“I’m so pumped for it,” the former reality star gushed to Us on Thursday. “I want [the weddings] to be a lot of fun. … I really want to take in what they want in the ceremony.”
With reporting by Marc Lupo