I Watch The Bachelor So You Don't Have To
The One With Emily, Ricki, A Couple Cute Dogs, and A Giant Bag of Tools
This season’s Bachelorette is Emily, a blonde Beauty Queen look-a-like from the South. She won The Bachelor on Brad’s second season, but they broke up shortly after the finale. Emily won America’s hearts not because she’s gorgeous (but she is) or because she’s a down-to-earth single mom (but she is), but because her first fiance and the father of her child was tragically and suddenly killed in a plane accident. When she told everyone, America cried together. He was a racecar driver who died on the way to a race. She was pregnant at the time. It really blows my mind that Emily is only 26 and she has a six-year-old daughter already. I mean, when I was 26, I was busy fucking up a lot of things, not being responsible for another person.
I’m a big fan of Emily. She is adorable. Also she used the phrase “big girl panties.” AS WE ALL SHOULD.
But let’s move on to the amusing part of the season: The Men. Always the men! As Peter put it after this week’s episode: “I now fully understand women who choose to stay single.”
This evening, a new season of ABC’s The Bachelorette begins, so, tonight, (or at least tomorrow), I’ll sit down with my TV and my iPad for two hours and watch the episode, carefully nothing everyone’s eccentricities and grammatical errors, and then I’ll use those notes to craft a really, really snarky post to recap the episode. It’s a lot like getting together with your friends to watch the episode, drink a couple bottles of wine (although I don’t do that part because wine on a school night equals Drea In A Coma), and trash talk everyone’s outfits and professions of love. Except that I just do that with my friends on the internet. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, or whatever, right?
Okay, well here’s the thing. Last season, I have it on very, very good authority (and by “authority,” I mean, “I can forward you her email if necessary”), that I actually did hurt the feelings of one of the contestants on the show. Whoopsies! I really had no idea that I was that important.
I dunno if it was THAT or if it was growing up a little bit or if it was the fact that every season is mostly the same, but about halfway through Watching The Bachelor So You Don’t Have To last season, I started to have some nagging second thoughts. Like my conscious just came out of the woodwork or something to say, hey, how funny is this, really?
Fact? IT’S FUNNY. This show is FUNNY. Mostly because it is such a producer-generated shitshow of epic proportions with false eyelashes and a helicopter.
But, what I did come to realize about halfway through last season is that, even though the show is contrived, the scenarios are contrived, the personalities are contrived, the feelings are actually pretty real. I mean, HORRIFICALLY MANIPULATED, but actually real. It’s possible that these people are falling in love with someone that they just met a few weeks ago, because all they’ve really done together is fun stuff, like had champagne and gone skydiving and been forced to talk about their feelings. And they’re not allowed to talk to their friends or family. And they’re especially not allowed to meet other eligible members of their preferred sex. It’s not like a real relationship at all. It’s not like real LIFE at all. So it’s only natural that these people might behave a little differently than they might under more normal circumstances.
Now that I’ve realized this, I think this might mean that I’m no longer a robot and I now I have feelings. It’s probably no coincidence that this happened around the same time that I started to develop a daily crying habit.
The hardest thing about writing about The Bachelor is that 26 women are having their feelings manipulated on national television. And, as we well know, society believes that any woman who has an emotion is “crazy.” As in, “bitches be crazy.” You know. You’ve heard that one before.
Well, if that’s really the case, then I must be a motherfucking nutbag and you guys should all probably commit me right now. I mean, I’ve publicly confessed to crying easily, so, if THAT’S not a reason to lock a person up, I don’t know what is. No. People, the women on these shows probably aren’t actually crazy. I mean, statistically, SOME of them may be, I don’t know! But, the thing is, just having feelings alone doesn’t make someone crazy – it makes them HUMAN. Now, if any of these women set another girl’s hair on fire or had dognapped Scotch and microwaved him, then, yeah… You could say that she was crazy.
Anyway, this moral problem is one that I probably won’t have during this upcoming season of The Bachelorette, because the tables are turned and there will be 26 “crazy” men (notice how that’s not a phrase you normally hear) instead of women. Men’s problems are different and they have very different ways of expressing their emotions, so I’m excited for that. I also hope that the producers make them fight each other in an organized fashion again.
But, ultimately, I continue to do this because it’s popcorn entertainment – entertainment just for the sake of being entertaining. But I do think that there are things we can learn from reality television. Like don’t drink too much on a first date. And “closure” doesn’t exist. And don’t make a scrapbook for someone who you’ve spent so little time with that your scrapbook actually has zero pictures of you together. Thanks, ABC’s The Bachelor. Thanks! And I’ll see you tonight.
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