Jenn Tran is sharing how her Dancing with the Stars partner Sasha Farber has helped her through her breakup from Bachelorette finalist Devin Strader.
While speaking exclusively with PEOPLE at the Los Angeles premiere of Wicked on Saturday, Nov. 9, Tran, 26, opened up about her tight bond with Farber, 39. The Bachelorette star says she and the dance pro have had each other’s back since she was eliminated in seventh place from DTWS last week. Already, she is missing their time together on the dance floor.
“Honestly, the past week has been really tough,” Tran says, referring to her elimination from the dance competition show on Oct. 29. “It’s the first day after I woke up and I was like, ‘Today’s the first day in seven weeks that I won’t dance a single step’, which is just sad. I truly had the time of my life while I was [on DWTS]. I really feel like it was the best couple of weeks of my life.”
“I really love dancing and I want to continue dancing, but when you’re an adult, it’s like, ‘What am I going to do? Take dance classes and then what?’ ” she continues. “But I’m still going to do it because I think people should be able to do what makes them happy. I’m still going to do some dance classes — and hopefully come back for the finale and do a little dance or something with Sasha.”
According to Tran, Farber encouraged her to stay focused on what “really matters” and remain grounded when she was in the midst of so much online controversy.
“He kept reminding me that it’s the stuff that’s not online that really matters, It’s your friends and family who know you the best that really matters,” Tran says of her dance partner.
“Right after the breakup [with Strader], I was going through a lot of stuff being said online and stuff being spilled out, and I had to just turn my phone off,” she continues, recalling the weeks after the controversial Bachelorette finale and some of the drama that ensued.
“Sasha really helped ground me and tell me that it’s my friends and family who really matter at the end of the day and everything’s going to blow over on social media and just keep doing me because at the end of the day, I only have myself, right?” she adds.
Tran and Strader broke up not long after a proposal in Hawaii. During the After the Final Rose special, the star told host Jesse Palmer of the pair’s relationship, “As soon as we had left Hawaii, things were just different.”
“It kind of just felt like he was pulling away all the promises that he had made to me — wanting to move somewhere together, wanting to have this future planned out, and wanting to see each other all the time,” she said.
Tran explained during the show that she then got a call from Strader after not hearing from him, and he told her he wanted to break off their engagement. They ended things over the phone.
Speaking with PEOPLE on Saturday, Tran also shared some of the best things she took away from DWTS and her time with Farber.
“I’m someone who’s not detail oriented at all. I’m very much like — I do whatever, I’m on my own timeline,” Tran explains. “And I think you have to be, with music and choreography and you’re counting music and all this stuff. So he really just helped me be a little bit more detail oriented.”
“Also he’s just such an amazing guy to have while I was going through so much,” she adds. “To have such a good human and a good friend throughout the whole thing, I really feel like it was such a healing process for me.”