The Golden Bachelor Is The Reality Show You’ve Been Waiting For
The premise of The Bachelor is preposterous. Consider:
Me: I want to introduce you to a brand-new dating app.
You: Ooh, sounds juicy. Tell me more!
Me: The good news is that it has handsome, marriage-oriented guys.
You: Great!
Me: The bad news is that there’s only one of them.
You: One?
Me: Yes.
You: You’re putting me on a dating app with only ONE guy?
Me: Yes.
You: You can’t be serious.
Me: I am. But I promise: no matter who he is, you’ll fall in love with him!
You: You’re handing me one man and guaranteeing me, sight unseen, that whoever he is, I’ll fall in love with him?
Me: Yes. But you’re competing against 30 other women.
You: Let me get this straight: I’m going on a dating site with one guy that I didn’t choose, I’m competing against 30 other women—
Me: —GORGEOUS women
You: GORGEOUS women. And no matter what he’s like – whether or not he’s funny or intellectually curious or likes giving oral sex – I’m expected to fall in love with him.
Me: And get engaged to him. On TV. In the next six weeks.
You: (hangs up)
Yet despite – or maybe because of – this patently absurd premise, The Bachelor is a reality show institution with multiple spinoffs, including The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise.
I’ll admit: prior to now, I only watched the very first season in 2002.
This is not to deny the guilty pleasure of the rose ceremonies. the hometown visits, and the “You’re not here for the right reasons” speeches.
This is only to say that The Bachelor is a bit too much like my day job for me. I would assume emergency room doctors didn’t watch E.R. either.
To me, The Bachelor is a helpful reminder that there are many attractive people who don’t understand the meaning of love. They think it’s about the mansion, the helicopter rides, and the chemistry created in these perfect courtship rituals, when, in fact, none of that explains why certain marriages last forever.
- Dating
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