I’m about to hop up on my soapbox.
In the interest of full disclosure I need to confess that I do not watch The Bachelor. I used to see it in the background at my friend’s house when we were waiting to watch South Park. Other than that, though, I’ve never watched The Bachelor.
According to my Twitter and Facebook feeds, it seems that I might be in the minority. Quite a lot of people watch The Bachelor and have deep, emotional responses to the show. People are heavily invested in the relationships on the show to the point of being on “Team Attractive White Girl #1” or “Team Attractive White Girl #2”.
The problem is that people are emotionally investing in a complete farce that communicates nothing about true love.
The Bachelor is not a show about love. It is a show about entertainment. Of the 14 prior seasons of The Bachelor, only one couple is still together.
One. Out. Of. 14.
And one of those 13 failed attempts includes this season’s bachelor, Brad. Apparently Brad didn’t learn from his first stint on The Bachelor that it’s almost mathematically impossible to find love on a reality television show. Ignoring a 7% success rate and his own experience, Brad threw caution to the wind and tried to find love again – in a produced, contrived and inorganic setting.
How romantic.
The Bachelor is a produced, contrived and inorganic piece of entertainment. It isn’t reality and it does nothing to reflect true, lasting and sacrificial love. So often, though, people treat it like it does. Instead of viewing The Bachelor for what it is, entertainment, people get so emotionally invested to the point of feeling wounded when their horse doesn’t win the race.
And a fake show with fake people trying to find fake love isn’t worth that kind of emotional response.
I’m fine with people watching The Bachelor; a lot of my good friends enjoy the show. However, with any show, movie or book, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to get too emotionally invested. We should recognize entertainment as such and enjoy it. Then when the show ends, when the credits roll or we finish the final chapter, we should choose to emotionally engage with the friends, family and loved ones God has placed in our lives.
I’ll be getting off my soapbox now. Thank you.
How do you feel about The Bachelor?
1- bars of soap must have been really big back in the day. 2- lol w/ taking the moral high ground by choosing South Park over the Bachelor. 3- most “reality” shows are far from it… get a life of your own people! (anyone know when the next season of Psych is comming out on Netflix? No… What about Lie To Me?)
Scott! I totally disagree.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with contrived, inorganic settings for finding love; that’s what most dates are.
I’m a little surprised you would call those people and their love fake. Do you mean superficial? I don’t think they’re faking who they are, or their feelings. Seems pretty genuine to me; that’s partly why I got into it. Oh, hm, maybe you meant fake as in not self-sacrificial? Hm, it’s not easy to judge the level of self-sacrifice in someone’s dating relationship. That’s a tough call to make.
A date may be contrived and inorganic, but television cameras exponentially raise the contrived and inorganic nature of the relationships on The Bachelor.
It’s hard to say if anyone is being genuine especially on a television show. Reactions, emotions and personalities can get inflated because of the medium; we don’t even know how people really reacted because everything is edited and produced for a specific response.
I think for those to whom we’re close, it’s easy to see if they’re self-sacrificial in their relationships. Since I’m not that close to The Bachelor, I need to base that assumption on the track record of the show. If the recipe has a 7% success rate then I’m going to draw some conclusions from that.
Thanks for the dissension. It’s invigorating.