She was one of the most talked about women on Arie Luyendyk Jr.‘s season of The Bachelor, but Bekah Martinez tells PEOPLE it wasn’t necessarily for the right reasons.
“I’ve never gotten so much judgment in my life about how old I am,” says the 22-year-old nanny, whose age was a point of contention throughout the season, despite the fact that there were other women in their early 20s.
On last week’s episode, fellow contestant Tia Booth, 26, took Luyendyk Jr., 36, aside and told him she didn’t think Martinez was ready for marriage. Martinez was sent home later that night.
“I simmered on it for three months,” Martinez admits. “I wanted so badly to be able to just let it go. But every time I would think about her, I would get livid. Watching it again, I wanted to throw something at the TV.”
“All of Tia’s time and energy was focused on talking about me in a way that I felt was very unjustified,” she adds. “It sucked.”
Martinez says she was deeply hurt by both the contestants’ — and Luyendyk Jr.’s — constant preoccupation with her age.
“When I left, the oldest person there was still nine years younger than Arie,” she says. “I think he was afraid of his feelings for me. I think he was looking for an out the whole time, and my age was the perfect thing. Had I been 27 or 28, he would have interpreted my energy and my attitude as part of my personality — whereas since he knew I was 22, he interpreted it as signs of immaturity. So it was frustrating.”
RELATED: The Bachelor‘s Arie Luyendyk Jr. Says 22-Year-Old Bekah M. Was ‘Worth the Risk’
But looking back now, Martinez says she believes things with the race-car-driver-turned-realtor wouldn’t have worked out anyway.
“I do wonder if our lives weren’t super compatible outside of this experience,” she says. “It’s funny. The things he wants that he attributes to being 36 — like, ‘I just want to go to bed at 7 p.m. and start popping out kids,’ I don’t know if I’ll have that attitude when I’m 36. I don’t think our ideas of marriage and a family life were really the same. And also, I didn’t want to move to Scottsdale!”
And there’s one more issue that Martinez hopes to put to rest: her infamous missing persons debacle.
“It was this crazy series of events,”she says of the report, filed by her mother when she wasn’t able to reach Martinez while she was out of cell service on a trip with friends.
RELATED: Arie Luyendyk. Jr. Weighs in on Bekah M.’s Missing Persons Report
“I talked to my mom 12 hours after she filed the report,” clarifies Martinez. “But we didn’t realize that I had to talk to directly to tell them I wasn’t missing.”
“My driver’s license photo is the worst driver’s license photo of all time,” she adds with a laugh. “I look like a Russian nesting doll, with the peacock earrings and the deer-in-the-headlights look. Everything about it is just awful. It is what it is!”
The Bachelor airs Mondays and the two-hour Women Tell All special airs this Sunday, both at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.