'Bachelor' Womack's engagement has been bumpy

After infamously choosing neither of the two finalists when he was the star of "The Bachelor" season 11, Brad Womack proposed to single mom Emily Maynard on the season-15 finale Monday night.

However, their engagement since the taping has not run smoothly.

"At long last, Emily and I can be open to the world and each other about our relationship," Womack, 38, an Austin, Texas, bar-owner, and Maynard, 25, a children's-hospital event planner from Charlotte, N.C., said in a joint statement Tuesday. "Though we are madly in love, it has been a bumpy couple of months for us and our priority right now is to focus on our relationship."

An ABC spokeswoman told Newsday the two are not giving interviews.

"It's been extremely hard," a sympathetic Chris Harrison, host of "The Bachelor," said Tuesday on Ryan Seacrest's radio program. "They've had some knockdown, drag-out fights." Even so, he insisted, "They are extremely happy. The good thing is they are really trying to make it work."

Runner-up Chantal O'Brien, 28, told People magazine Tuesday she is "doing a lot better" after her emotional departure from the show.

"What you saw on the finale, I had just gotten my heart broken," the Seattle executive assistant said. "There I was thinking this is someone I could have a future with and [he] didn't want to be with me." She has since begun dating a local businessman. "I've had time to heal and move forward."

From 'Bachelor,' the next 'Bachelorette'

Ashley Hebert, this season's second runner-up on "The Bachelor," has been chosen as the new "Bachelorette."

"I was approached a little while back [and] I found out for certain very recently," the Maine native, 26, told Jimmy Kimmel on his late-night talk show Monday, where ABC announced her much-rumored casting.

Hebert, who's scheduled to get her dentistry degree in May, told Kimmel, "I've been single for almost four years." When the talk-show host asked how many dates she'd had in that time, she replied, "Not many. . . I don't know, five? I'm excited, I'm [going to be] making up for lost time!"

The seventh edition of "The Bachelorette" premieres May 23.