I don’t even have the excuse of having got addicted early. A bit like I did with smoking, I started watching The Bachelor at an age when I should have known better, in fact, going in with The Bachelorette’s 17th season.
Its star was a smiley brunette named Katie who seemed, oddly to me – hadn’t they just met? – to these men to have a reputation as someone who was sexually open and unrestrained.
I didn’t know, then, that the star of each season, more often than not, is plucked from the annals of Bachelor Nation (that’s what the entire Bachelor world, and its fandom, is referred to as). Katie had been a contestant on season 25 of The Bachelor, and then went on to become The Bachelorette.
I have since witnessed Michelle Young – who also appeared on The Bachelor’s 25th season – become Bachelorette number 18. For the show’s 19th season, they made the weird decision to have two Bachelorettes, Gabby and Rachel, both of whom we had met on season 26 of The Bachelor, which aired directly after Katie’s season of Bachelorette.
By then, of course, I was up to speed on how it all worked – I had seen Gabby and Rachel have their hearts broken by Clayton, a cardboard cutout of a man who claimed to have fallen in love with all three of the finalists in his season. “I’m so broken,” he wept to the camera in a thrilling clip that was shoehorned into every single preview that season, in a “coming soon” section tacked on to the end of each episode.
That one moment, with his quivering lower lip barely covering his gigantic, blindingly white teeth, elicited in me a sort of schadenfreude that I couldn’t quite explain. I watched the previews each and every week, wishing, every single time, that next week would be the episode, that we would finally see the moment that broke Clayton so effectively.
In the end, of course, it was anti-climactic, as it always is. He fell in love with three women, he said; he didn’t know what to do, he said; but he did, in fact, know what to do, and dumped both Rachel and Gabby for contestant number 3, Susie Evans, interestingly, the only one of the three who hadn’t slept with him during their “fantasy suites” date.
This is not interesting, really – that a man would choose the woman who held back from sleeping with him is incredibly, dramatically, heart-stoppingly boringly predictable. Something something milk and cows being free something something.
I don’t know why I’m surprised, honestly – there is nothing interesting about The Bachelor or The Bachelorette or Bachelor Nation in general, which seems then to serve as a sort of dating-and-friendship pool for former contestants to fish in. Didn’t they have any friends before they came on this show?! Because now all they seem to do is hang out with each other!
In the grand scheme of things, I’m still a Bachelor Nation newbie, so I wasn’t around for any of the big scandals – a previous host was fired for (of all stupid things to be fired for) defending the decision of a contestant to go to a racist, plantation-themed party (ugh), for example – but it’s hard to see how anything could be scandalous in this utterly bland televisual example of human behaviour at its absolute dullest.
In the latest season, Zach Shallcross, another cardboard cutout man and reject from Gabby and Rachel’s season (where there was almost a scandal after some conversation he had with Rachel off camera caused him to go off her entirely), is vying for the attentions of approximately 300 nurses, an Instagram influencer and a speech therapist, and despite their best efforts at diversity and representation, these women are barely distinguishable from one another, no matter how many times their names, home towns and jobs are flashed up on screen.
And yet.
I watch on Tuesday evenings, because it is aired on Mondays at 8pm and that’s bedtime, so I’m usually forced to make myself busy doing the washing up or sorting out clothes (anything to avoid doing bedtime, honestly), and can’t be seen to be sitting watching TV, lest I get roped in to brushing teeth.
So I save it for the following day.
I don’t need to bother avoiding spoilers because I genuinely don’t care who goes home – each week sees at least one woman eliminated, usually for some asinine reason or another (“our connection just didn’t grow” or “the other girls thought you were boasting about our connection”) – and I don’t need to truly concentrate on the show when I do watch it, because nothing has ever happened, I would argue, in the history of Bachelor Nation, that has made anyone sit up and pay attention.
This week, I watched while stuffing our reusable nappies. It’s all ahead of you, folks, I thought, as these fools talked about how much they want a family and how they think Zach will be a great father figure (but will he stuff the nappies?!).
I witnessed at least five different moments where people cried, something that will often elicit a crying response from me – I’m that empathetic – but Bachelor Nation tears just hit differently. Boo hoo, I think, it must be terrible not to be chosen to get engaged to this cardboard cutout you met a month ago. Boo hoo.
I think a lot about the live audience they bring in for two late-in-the-season episodes – “Women / Men Tell All” and then a live finale – and I wonder how they watch the show. Is it with loathing in their hearts and nappy liners in their hands, like me? Or do they get together with friends and drink fancy drinks and truly root for these robotic soap stars?
How does one get chosen for the audience of the live shows? Would I get kicked out if I held up a sign that simply said, “STOP WHITENING YOUR TEETH” or “DOESN’T ANYONE AROUND HERE READ?!” (I long for a reality TV dating star to talk about books or films or anything cultural because there is only so much I can take of beautiful people asking one another what their type is, honestly)?
Perhaps I’ll write a novel about a young woman who applies to be on a dating show and falls in love with one of her fellow contestants and is then cancelled for being gay and starring in the straightest TV show imaginable! Then again, maybe not. I’m too busy watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and, for my sins, Bachelor in Paradise, where the dregs of the two main shows go to a Mexican beach and get drunk and behave terribly in the hopes of finding love or fame or something.
As every child I know has wailed at me at least once: I hate my life.