By Carrie Wood
Reporter Newspapers

Jason Mesnick has been asked about heartache before.

Heartache is what led Kirkland’s 32-year-old single father to be on ABC’s “The Bachelorette” last season. In the final episode, he felt the pang again when DeAnna Pappas rejected his marriage proposal.

So when asked how he feels about being in love, Mesnick pauses.

“It’s just the best thing in the world,” he told the Reporter over the phone while on a trip to Los Angeles last week. “It’s just more than I ever hoped for.”

The local account executive recently returned as the program’s leading man for “The Bachelor,” which debuted on Jan. 5.

The Reporter chatted with Mesnick about his life off the set when he is in Kirkland hanging out with his 3-year-old son, Ty, and about his experience of finding his new love on the show.

Question: What are some of your favorite hangout spots in Kirkland?

Answer: I’m so casual. There’s a little Greek restaurant called Santorini (on Central Way) that I love to go and stop by and get a euro at. There’s a cactus restaurant in downtown Kirkland that I love to go to, but then a lot of times, you know, if I’m with Ty, I’ll take him down to the waterfront and we’ll feed the ducks or just skip rocks or we’ll go up to watch a baseball game at Peter Kirk. I mean, you can just walk around there and there’s stuff to do all day long.

Question: What else do you do in your free time when you’re not surrounded by crazed fans?

Answer: You know, with Ty, he’s such a boy’s boy. Like right now, he’s into race cars and Speedracer and all sorts of sports. He loves golf and he loves baseball and he loves football and he loves to wrestle. It’s all sports stuff with Ty.

Question: What neighborhood in Kirkland do you live in?

Answer: I live up by Evergreen Hospital.

Question: Can you tell us about your house?

Answer: Oh, I live in not a very big house. I mean, it might be 1,200 square feet, three bedrooms. It’s big enough for Ty and I to hang out and play. One of our pieces of furniture is a big bean bag instead of a couch.

Question: What brought you to be on “The Bachelor?”

Answer: A friend of mine who I’ve known for 10 years and was in my wedding was on “The Bachelor” show maybe two years ago. I just remember turning on the TV and it was kind of midway through the season. I thought, you know what, I’d like to do something like that.

(Laughs.) I mean, I didn’t know that was going to be my future destiny at that point, but I sent an e-mail in and I said, here’s my story, and they called me back a year later.

Question: How’s Ty been through the whole experience?

Answer: Ty knows the TV guys and that includes when he met Deanna last year and the couple of girls he met this year, and that includes everybody who was so great to him when things were happening — an audio person putting something on his head so he can hear his own voice, a camera guy teaching him how to use a camera. And those are all TV guys to him, and that’s what Ty remembers out of all of this.

Question: What was the most challenging part of the season for you?

Answer: The final day, without a doubt. Yeah, that final day is the biggest roller coaster of emotions you could ever imagine. I’ve never dated more than one person at the same time and to fall in love with two people was … I mean, you talk about the happiness, the most heartache I’ve ever felt in such a short period of time

Question: Any wedding details?

Answer: No. We have not started talking about the wedding. We’re both adjusting to the show’s airing and adjusting to what things are going to be like now. We need to make sure that everything’s going to move at the right pace for us.

Question: Will you remain in Kirkland?

Answer: Yeah, there’s no way I’m moving away from the Kirkland area because that’s where I am with Ty and I would never take him away from his mom.