If you’ve watched the latest season of The Bachelor, you’ve been confronted by the sheer banality of it. With Joey Graziadei, a conventionally attractive (he has princely hair) pro tennis player from Philly, the franchise has mostly returned to its roots: apolitical, heteronormative, and very white. This comes after a few experiments with Black leads, which had great and catastrophic outcomes, respectively.
I’ll admit I haven’t watched Bachelor or Bachelorette for several years — since the blowup during Matt James’s 2021 season. But with a drama drought in my other reality TV lineups, I decided to give the show another chance. It didn’t take long to notice that things are…different.
The machine — conniving producers, awkward cuts, nerve-wracked interviews before the rose ceremony — is unchanged. But the shine of budding romance that used to shield from view some of the machinery is gone.
I was drawn to Bachelor and Bachelorette in my teens by the same force that as a kid made me pause, rewind, and replay the climactic kiss scene in Sleeping Beauty. The long and intoxicating build-up of affection, the high-stakes approach, and the cathartic release of a kiss.
Bachelor delivered that thrill over and over, reliably — sometimes thrice in the same episode! You knew people would “fall,” because they always fell on The Bachelor. But finding out who and how and when, and how hard, was the allure.
There are no more breath-catching first kisses. I find Joey amazingly dull, if sweet. He is so devoid of expression that producers had to fabricate an emotional peak halfway through the season, overlaying a melancholy instrumental song as Joey walked away from the cameras mid-interview in a Montreal park, a couple of tears in his eyes. His concern then, as throughout the season, was that he’d fall for someone who won’t want him back (understandable, considering he was dumped by his Bachelorette ex just as he was about to propose).
The only resonant moments have been when the women shared heavy, personal stories, like the grief after losing a parent at a young age or how endometriosis shapes their experience of romantic relationships and their timeline for becoming a parent.
But no other feeling registers. Where is The Bachelor’s pulse? The season is soulless, and even sexless, as if the cast members are flirting over text — words and thoughts, but no visceral connection at all.
It got me thinking about whether the flatness of dating shows these days is just mirroring my generation’s intimacy issues. If the commentators are right, we have an endless buffet of dating prospects anywhere in the world; we toy around, entertaining our many options while carefully keeping them open; we make choices based on morsels of information and pictures, stripping compatibility down to its basic parts and hoping they fit; we give people one night (two at most) and are quick to cut them off if they don’t fit into our idea of what we like. We collect “icks” like laundry quarters. Above all else, we try to protect ourselves from embarrassment, from heartbreak and from becoming fodder for someone else’s group chat. We dread becoming a meme.
On The Bachelor, if you pay close attention to the substance of the dialogue, some of the same instincts are on display. No longer are we asked to suspend disbelief and get sucked into the grand fantasy of the show. It’s now impossible to forget the fact that this is a television show. The game is laid bare.
People discuss how much time they’re getting, if they’ll get a date, and whether they’ll get a rose. They openly strategize ways to make it farther. That’s always been the fare among the contestants, especially during those awkward, full-couch conversations in the mansion. But now, it’s also what Joey and the women talk about. Instead of getting to know each other on screen, or seeming to enjoy the company, all we see are conversations about the machine. They talk about how he chose people for other dates, and how they hope to stick around for longer. When they express their insecurities, it’s only to get affirmation — to see where they stand against other competitors, and level up through their display of “vulnerability” — while their cards stay close to the vest.
The Bachelor used to be fun because it made real-life love into a high-stakes game, now the show just airs the wariness (and weariness) that results from us all playing this dating game in real life. It has become easy to imagine what it’s like as a contestant because so many of us already live like that: not trusting, knowing the person we like is also forming connections with other people simultaneously, and never taking a stand because we don’t know where we stand.
The finalists toss out the requisite Bachelor teaser text (“I’m starting to fall…”) but stumble and stop short of meaningful declarations. They never say why they’re falling, the future they’re envisioning. Nobody wants to be the first to go balls-to-the-wall. And none of them are acting like people in love.
Of course, there is a valid case to be made that people aren’t as bought-in because the conceits of most dating shows are outdated. The Bachelor is a 22-year-old juggernaut, and once its makers figured out what worked, they kept doing it. It’s filmed over six weeks, or about 42 days. In the real world, that’s enough time to meet, date, and break up with a few people.
By some accounts, the lead and their chosen partner only spend a few days’ worth of time together before they get engaged. Most of that one-on-one time happens in groups: morsels at cocktail parties and on dates with 8 other contestants. It’s no way to live. And, obviously, there’s the ethical question around funneling two dozen people into an emotional slaughterhouse to end up with a TV-worthy proposal. Any show that forces marriage as the only acceptable outcome is out of line with younger generations.
The skepticism makes sense. People are reasonably scared of embarrassing themselves on national TV. They become celebrities overnight, scrutinized, judged and made fun of by people online. (By the same token, yes, lots of people figured out they could go on the show and get enough publicity to quit their day jobs. They are not there for the “right reasons,” as Bachelor Nation loves to say.) But where is everything else?
Shouldn’t the condensed timeline make relations even sparklier? If you only get a total of three days with someone you like enough to marry, those hours should burn white-hot. Joey’s Bachelor has none of that.
Where’s the delicacy of love on screen? Where’s the tension of two bodies that can’t have each other? Like in so much of our media, depictions of desire even on “reality” TV lack humanity. We got Katilyn Bristowe and Hannah Brown, and that was it. Even on Love Is Blind, where people don’t know what their crush looks like because they’re talking to each other from opposite “pods,” the show is strikingly devoid of any conversation about bodies. These people are getting engaged without ever meeting face-to-face, and they don’t talk about their erotic selves or what they want out of sex. It would be one thing if those were culturally sensitive or religious choices; for most people, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
On The Bachelor, we get “fantasy suites.” And there are strict, unwritten rules surrounding how those dates are used (see: Kaitlyn and Hannah backlash). All sexuality on the show is sealed into those black boxes. That feels particularly true this season.
As I was thinking through all this, I came across Magdalene J. Taylor’s essay on how situationships have destroyed romance. In it, Taylor writes about our cultural transition from hookup culture to situationships, which put “a thin veneer of connection and familiarity over what is essentially the same practice, yet it appears to be even less sexually motivated.”
The situationship, like dating apps, is “more about having someone to text constantly and stalk on social media than it is having a partner,” and all of the complexity that entails, Taylor argues.
“The situationship’s biggest crime is that it is fundamentally unsexy. It’s a sign of our mass immaturity, our inability to feel things honestly and wholeheartedly. Situationship culture is one of mass self-deception.”
Maybe the conditions that made us want something like The Bachelor are gone. Or maybe it’s a show for older generations far removed from our modern love conundrum.
Sitting on my couch watching, and in a restaurant observing young couples around me, I wonder the same thing sometimes: Where’s the chewiness of those flushed-cheek conversations at the beginning of a love affair? Love Is Blind, for all its faults, does have some of this, because it replicates the environment of long phone calls with a crush.
But everyone on The Bachelor, including Joey, seems bored. I assume reality shows’ better regulation of how much contestants are drinking (noticeably few drunken tirades in recent years) plays a role. But it seems the only way to get the women thrilled about the Bachelor project is to lock them in the house and dangle time outside in front of them. They’re more desperate to leave that damn driveway, pull on a cute outfit and have a decent meal than to spend time with their alleged dream guy. Just like us?
It’s the kind of thirst that drives one to lay in bed and swipe through Hinge just to try and feel something. Flattery will do.
There’s much more to be said about how these behaviors play out across dating reality shows. For now I am left wondering how we create media that reflects the real experience of love, or if we’re too far gone. Think of how modern romcoms, when they get made, are so formulaic.
Reality TV, with all its warts and uncomfortable moments, still feels to me like it could be the place to watch some truth unfold. That’s what drew me to the genre in the first place: real conflicts, resolution, relationship ebbs and flows. The Queer Ultimatum got closer to capturing the tension but still left me wanting more. Maybe novels are our last reserve, or film — formats that ask something of us, the way romance does.
As Haley Nahman pointed out in a convincing essay a couple of years ago, our obsession with immediacy and “frictionlessness” puts us at odds with the stuff that is pleasurable and truly sexy — mess, sweat, wrinkles, hair, waiting.
Sexuality is “the ultimate euphemism for earthly pleasures and all its attendant qualities: desire, touch, anguish, longing, satisfaction, thrill, connection, presence. Essentially everything the internet can’t meaningfully give us,” she writes.
I’ve kept watching The Bachelor for two reasons: Maria Georgas, a bold Greek-Canadian actress who had the best wardrobe by far of any Bachelor contestant in memory, and morbid curiosity. Let’s see how things pan out tomorrow night.
Have a great week,
Isa
Rummaging is written by Isa Cueto and edited by Annie Cappetta. To support our little homemade, hand-crafted, artisan newsletter, subscribe and share.