How The Bachelor Illuminates the Falsehoods In Our Lives

by Emily Joy Allison 

I get a lot of scornful, “I can’t believe YOU watch THE BACHELOR” sort of comments from my friends when they find out about my obsession. Granted, if you know me even a little, it’s a bit surprising. On the surface, someone like me (feminist, relatively moral human being, incurable monogamist) watching a show like The Bachelor requires a level of cognitive dissonance few are capable of. But I promise it all makes sense if you dig a little deeper.

What appeals to me about The Bachelor franchise isn’t the drama, the hot men, the international travel, or the suspense of the rose ceremonies. It’s the completely accidental, unintentional running commentary the show provides on human nature in general, and specifically human relationships.

Hear me out.

We laugh at the people competing for love every Monday night at 8/7c because we intuitively recognize the motions they are going through as false. We see that, by and large, the emotions these men and women purport to be feeling are fabricated products of a completely unnatural situation involving isolation, groupthink, and lots of alcohol. “Nobody could fall in love in eight weeks while dating twenty-four other people!” we scoff. When the last rose is handed out, we see the dejection on the face of the unlucky bachelorette that didn’t get chosen; we wonder how she didn’t see it coming; we know Hunky McHotpants only let her go because she wasn’t as pretty as the other girls and that’s really all he cares about anyway. If we have even a vestige of a conscience, we feel a pang of empathy as we watch the jilted almost-lover riding away in a black limo, crying and talking about how stupid she feels for thinking this time things would be different.

But here’s the thing: each of us has been in the metaphorical black limo. We have all, at one time or another, felt stupid for thinking, this time, it would be different. We have all imagined ourselves in love with someone we didn’t really know, we have all let special circumstances and free booze replace hard work and critical thinking. There is a very thin line that separates each of us from the contestants on The Bachelor, and that line is social shame. Most of us wouldn’t be caught dead baring our souls on national television like that, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t thought those Exact. Same. Things.

Which leads to the question of whether or not those things, those feelings, are fake—as we assume them to be when we see them on television—or whether they’re integral parts of the human experience. Anyone can tell you that much of The Bachelor franchise is heavily manipulated, if not outright scripted. Read interviews with past contestants and they will tell you that the producers will purposely set up situations to cause drama and ask extremely pointed questions just to get the “money quotes” they need to make the series as successful as it is. It is both a science and an art. But it’s not all fake, as the (albeit few) very real and lasting marriages that have resulted from the show will testify. Sometimes it’s real, and sometimes it works.

Which could just as well be said about our relationships in real life.

Sometimes it’s real. And sometimes it works.

I wonder if some part of the scorn and derision people express towards The Bachelor comes from the fact that The Bachelor is, unintentionally but effectively, a mirror of human nature. It shows us what we are really like at our rawest, our most shameless. It shows us just how far we will go to find love (and just how far we will go to get laid).

And that is, well, kind of gross. It’s uncomfortable to see ourselves and our pain in the face of a drunk, white girl in a limousine with mascara smeared all over her cheeks, whose name is probably “Britney S.” and has an occupation like “dog lover” or “free spirit.” We’re more sophisticated than that, aren’t we?

Deep down, we know we aren’t. So it is easier not to look at it. It is easier to watch Breaking Bad and Orange is the New Black and Game of Thrones, more serious, sophisticated shows, and pretend that those somehow say more about human nature than a series as shallow and frivolous as The Bachelor.

In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis writes of his deceased wife:

“Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. And how or why did such a reality blossom (or fester) here and there into the terrible phenomenon called consciousness? Why did it produce things like us who can see it and, seeing it, recoil in loathing? Who (stranger still) want to see it and take pains to find it out, even when no need compels them and even though the sight of it makes an incurable ulcer in their hearts? People like H. herself, who would have truth at any price.”

Perhaps that also applies to reality television. 

Emily Joy Allison is a poet and provider of fine burritos in Nashville, Tennessee. Her first album is called Dichotomized and can be found on her website emilyjoypoetry.com. You can follow her on Twitter @softlysoaring. 

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Confessions of a Hopeless Romantic: The Bachelorette and Online Dating

by Ben Howard

I don't watch the Bachelor or the Bachelorette with any regularity, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying the show when I do. In my defense, I love sports and the sport of competitive dating is no different. But I also love fairy tales and the Bachelor/ette is, at its core, a fairy tale. It's a fictional story of people who fall in love in a magical land and live happily ever after. The show ends happily ever after; pay no attention to the broken engagement behind the curtain.

I've always been a hopeless romantic at heart, so I often give myself over to fairy tale daydreams of love. I don't just want love and a wife, I want a story, and a good one at that. I want one of those stories that you tell your kids for like eight years and becomes the basis for a hit sitcom on CBS. Simple enough, right?

But there's another side to me that's deeply rational and a bit cynical. This is the side that is over fairy tales and the artistic machinations of love. This is the side that talks me into signing up for dating websites.

Everybody has a dating website. JDate if you're Jewish. Christian Mingle if you're a Christian. OKCupid if you're poor and/or bored with normal humans. Personally, after a fair amount of internet dating experimentation, I've settled on eHarmony. It's like dating, but with more math and less of that messy personal interaction.

Seriously, it's fantastic. You can work through a list of potential matches to see which one's short answer writing style sets your heart aflutter. Personally, I weed out all matches that set off personal pet peeve alarms. This includes anyone who says they read Captivating or Twilight unironically as well as anyone who refers to God with capitalized pronouns (unless they were feminine pronouns, then I might be intrigued).

I've even re-worked my own profile multiple times. I've written it serious and straight-forward, manic and ridiculous, gentle and sweet, and, most recently, semi-honestly. I use the best picture I've ever taken as my profile picture, even though it's more than two years old and it only shows half my face. I just really want people to see the best version of me, which coincidentally, is only tangentially related to who I really am.

This is insane. This is ridiculous. This is real life.
Sometimes I'll joke that I really want to start a relationship six months in, or better yet, like six years in. I want to be comfortable and vulnerable with the other person now. I want to trust them now. I want them to understand my weird quirks and my occasionally bizarre anti-social behavior now. I want to be known, but I don't want to go through that messy, awkward process of letting someone get to know me.

I'm caught in this trap, really we all are, between who I am and who I'd like you to think I am. The first is comfortable for me, but I'm scared you won't like it. The second one causes me deep anxiety, but I enjoy the affirmation.

Though this seems disingenuous, I'm not certain that it is. Maybe we have to let people get to know our somewhat artificial, definitely superficial selves before they can get to know the beautiful/frightening person on the inside.

I've had friendships that were birthed out of emotional difficulty. They are wonderful and I love these friends very much, but there is a problem. It's hard to be normal friends with them, it's hard to just hang out. We can talk about life and death and pain and suffering and I know things about them and they know things about me that I wouldn't share with another soul, but a normal conversation sometimes eludes us.

I don't think we earn the really valuable, long-lasting relationships we crave unless we go through the mess and anxiety of learning about each other slowly, over time. I think we need the often frustrating path towards trust and friendship and love. We don't need a fairy tale, because they aren't real, but I don't know if we need formulas either, because they aren't true.

Love is insane. Love is ridiculous. Love is real life.

Peace,
Ben

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

 

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A Little Crazy Behind the Eyes: The Bachelor and How to Date 15 Churches at Once

Apparently "Worth the Drive"

by Amanda Taylor

My parents packed up and carried off their three little girls to church every week, every Sunday morning, every Sunday evening, and every Wednesday night for my entire childhood. Thirty-five minutes it took to get to the modest, small brown building on the left-hand side of North Court Street in Circleville, Ohio. Thirty-five minutes to get there, thirty-five minutes to get home, every week through the cornfields and past the paper plant to sit in the pew right behind the 85 year-old woman who’s had When the Roll is Called Up Yonder memorized since 1936.

“A Church Alive is Worth the Drive.”

What is a “church alive?” That phrase has continued to silently whisper in my ear, haunting me since its plastic black letters first appeared on the church sign out front 22 years ago. By many of today’s standards, this church was deadern’ a doornail. Small, both cramped and yet somehow drafty, adverse to change, enthusiastic about routine, skeptical of outside influence, a lover of How Shall the Young Secure Their Hearts.

It is as objectionable to me now as it is entrenched. The comfort, love, and safety I feel in that small Church of Christ setting is something that I am certain will never be replicated, but it is also confining, and limiting, and maddening. So where do I belong? How do I practice this faith in a way that will honor my parents’ commitment, as well as the great blessing and curse of my own?

After swim practice in the fifth grade a friend asked me what religion I was, and when I answered, “Church of Christ,” they told me that wasn’t a thing. Feeling bad for me, they asked if I was, you know, Catholic or something? I pondered, unsettled, and panicked and then asked my dad on the way home from church the next Sunday, Hey Dad? Are we Catholic? Only years later did I realize how incredible my question sounded to him, once it became a running joke through our entire extended family that I might be “the Catholic one,” but that I wasn’t sure.

A little crazy.

Perhaps this confusion about belonging burrowed a little too far into my heart and mind, because now I wonder all over again “what I am.” I must go to church; I have gotten this far.  But the decision of where that will occur is another matter entirely. I find myself, having watched The Bachelor a time or two, seeing parallels between my pursuit for a church community and the latest Bachelor’s quest to date 15 women at one time. Every single option is beautiful, though it carries with it the subtle suspicion of crazy behind the eyes.  

For the record, I don’t think it’s normal to date 15 people at one time. The idea of getting to pick your soul mate while chaotically making out with as many people as you can get away with in the meantime is insanity, which I presume is why it makes for such good television. The human emotion on display is very raw (reference ugly cry here) but it’s expressed in the midst of an entirely orchestrated and fake environment. How do you honor what is real within a production?  

Doesn’t church educate me about what is true and eternal in this human experience through the mechanism of a production? Are churches focused on creating an environment that draws you in and convinces you of their authenticity and relevance, in a great bid for relationship? If The Bachelor is how we are normalizing relationship building in society, is not the church susceptible to similar whimsical and fleeting ideas of commitment? I don’t know how to date 15 churches without inherently judging them all and committing to none, and I’d appreciate being able to blame reality television if at all possible.  

In participating in all these competing religious environments however, I’m struck more by the similarities than the differences. I notice the love and the passion and the cold indifference, coexisting in foldout chairs and velvet-lined pews. I see and experience comfort in the routine, and feel resentment in our complacency. I feel music wash over the body gathered, the rhythm of the words fusing the masses, the repetition calming and steadying, and maybe the drums, either loud and accosting or beating out any worry and tension we’ve brought with us that day.  

The uniting of many for the glory of one is very powerful, and critically important to the practice of faith. We humble ourselves before what is perfect in the hope that we may rest in it, for just a moment, to carry away to the corners of our world whatever remnants are gracious enough to linger.

Person or symbol?

Watching the black smoke turn to white this week, I found myself humbled by the Catholic faith, connected to it. This is the uniting of many, centered, focused on who will lead them in pursuit of the glory and honor of one. This is not political posturing or parochial strategy or a statement to society as much as it is the body of Christ, a church alive.

The press surrounding this important and significant changing of the guard is chilling; it’s analytical and manufactured, yet it reminds me too much of my pursuit of a church community. We have already stripped Pope Francis of his humanity and understand him instead as his geography, his routines, his Jesuit background, and his political implications.  

The Catholic faith quickly becomes a body we review as we would another social psychology case study, peering in upon its internal strife and posturing, labeling so much as scandal and tawdry. We turned church into The Bachelor and asked ourselves if our favorite contestant won. How perilous to think of faith as something that can be contained by policy and bureaucratic refinement or understood by the world’s standards.

In the end church is a production of sorts, an orchestration of people, ideas, action, and relationship, to say something to the world and to the individual about the Creator. It is inviting us to see its relevance and look past its flaws and, more than anything, is asking for participation, for faith, to just show up to own version of a modest, small brown building on the left-hand side of North Court Street.

“It is to provide an example that submitting to the practice of worship and the leadership of those in charge is a Christian teaching about humility and submission to God.” My dad said that.

Amanda works in “community development” and no, she doesn’t know what that means either. Forever the critic. And enthusiast. Never one for dichotomies. Follow her on Twitter @tayloram03 if you’re not into receiving tweets.

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