Matt James Revealed The Most Important Thing He Looks For In A Partner

Matt James has no shortage of exciting contestants vying for his heart on Season 25 of The Bachelor. There's a flight attendant, a TikTok star, a socialite, one of his rumored exes, and former Bachelor contestant Heather Martin (you might remember her first-ever kiss on Colton Underwood's season), among many others. How is he going to narrow down the dating pool? Matt James revealed what he's looking for on The Bachelor in a Jan. 4 interview with Elite Daily.

"[What] I value most is being trustworthy," he tells Elite Daily. "You've got to be someone that I can trust, and I've got to be that for you, and you've got to be that for me."

While he wouldn't confirm if he's engaged, he did share how he developed relationships with his contestants while filming from September to November 2020 at the Nemacolin Resort in Farmington, Pennsylvania.

"I've tried to trail-blaze in terms of what I was looking for," he says. "So, if I was asking for vulnerability, then I would share something that I was uncomfortable with. And I just constantly tried to do that so that these women knew that I was going to meet them where they were at, and most of the time I did."

He shared more about what he's looking for with Entertainment Tonight's Lauren Zima (who happens to be host Chris Harrison's girlfriend) in a Jan. 4 interview. "What I'm looking for isn't specific to a race, and that's why I was extremely excited about the group of women I saw. It represented everybody," he said.

James also opened up about the pressures he faced as the franchise's first Black Bachelor, following Rachel Lindsay's history-making run as the franchise's first Black lead in 2017. "I felt a lot, I'm not going to lie," he said. "But the more conversations I had with Chris [Harrison] — he helped me realize that I only speak for myself, and my experience was my own, and when someone has an opinion, whether they're white or Black, that's their opinion. It doesn't mean that all Black or white people think that way."

James' season premieres on ABC at 8 p.m. ET.

Reporting by Lexi Williams.