Rose-Colored Glasses

It’s early morning in late July, and I’m standing outside a CVS in Rockland, Maine, waiting for the doors to open. It’s the summer of 2015 — the United States just legalized gay marriage, Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” is at the top of the charts, and CNN reports it to be the hottest summer on meteorological record. I’ll turn 13 in a week. For now, I’m focused on one thing only: picking up a copy of the latest issue of People Magazine with Kaitlin Bristowe and Shawn Booth on the cover.

I had been introduced to Bristowe that spring through a little show called The Bachelor, a reality show on ABC in which contestants vie for the protagonist’s hand in marriage. Alongside 29 other women, Bristowe competed for the heart of farmer Chris Soules during the show’s 19th season. She came in third place, and then went on to become the Bachelorette. I watched her season religiously that summer, and I haven’t missed a season of the show since.

It’s hard to explain why. It was always less about the show and more so about everything surrounding it. I think of times over the last seven years that have stuck with me from this franchise. Watching Chris Soules’s season with my older sister and her friends and thinking they were the coolest people in the world. Freshman year of high school, bonding with new friends over who from Nick Viall’s Season 21 would become the next Bachelorette. All the summers spent watching Bachelor in Paradise. Senior spring, sleeping over at my best friend’s house on Monday nights to watch Peter Weber’s Season 24 of The Bachelor just before the world shut down.

Recently, my mother, a high-strung, type-A, Aries lawyer who watches almost exclusively low-budget British detective shows, admitted something to me: while pregnant with me, she watched the first season of The Bachelor. I don’t count Alex Michel’s Season 1 of the Bachelor as one I’ve seen, since I was a fetus and therefore not able to appreciate the nuance in its portrayal of Americana and its grim reflections on the commodification of love. But in my developing stages, as I absorbed the oxygen and nutrients my mother consumed, maybe some of the reality TV she consumed snuck its way through the umbilical cord as well. Now, as a whole human being, I can say I’ve seen 12 full seasons of The Bachelor, 10 of The Bachelorette, and seven of Bachelor in Paradise.

Last Friday, The Bachelor turned 20. In a few months, I will too. Through my tumultuous and overly dramatic teenage years, The Bachelor has become even more tumultuous. In the last seven years, I’ve grown out of friends and towns and identities and oh-so-many hairstyles, but one thing has stuck with me since I was 12 years old. As I exit my teenage years, I’m realizing a chilling truth: The Bachelor is the longest relationship I’ve ever had.

If I’m being honest, it’s not one worth maintaining. It’s not a good friend to me — it’s unreliable, it’s a mess, it makes me angry and sad and confused and complicit.

Really, I cannot overstate how bad this show is. On an entertainment level alone, it is incredibly hard to watch. Production is sloppily heavy-handed, and the drama feels forced and unconvincing. On a cultural level, it has spent 20 years promoting thinness and whiteness as the ideal beauty standard. On a Marxist level, ABC executives are making millions off the exploitation and humiliation of their contestants, who are not compensated for their driving role in this multi-million- dollar franchise.

In recent years, viewership has been dropping off so sharply that production is trying to make every season the “most dramatic season ever.” That often means tear shots. And lots of them. The first night of this season’s finale included a 10-minute sequence of the finalists breaking down to their cores, crying on staircases and struggling to breathe through gasping sobs. Then, the camera panned out to the live studio audience watching the destruction, and the show’s host advertised more drama to come after a quick commercial break.

On the one hand, The Bachelor is and always has been escapism. But at the same time, the content I’m using as a fun distraction centers the emotional degradation of real people with jobs and lives and families. As I become a lucid adult, I start to wonder at what point I’m a viewer of reality TV, and at what point I’m a citizen in The Capitol of the Hunger Games, savoring suffering from the safe perch of my couch.

Society has progressed past The Bachelor. Why haven’t I?

I wish I could say I watch because I love the bonding that comes with it, but that’s no longer the case. All my friends with whom I used to watch and debrief now find the show boring and cheesy. I don’t blame anyone who can’t stomach it. I can barely stomach it.

Part of the diegetic appeal must be my competitive side that likes to watch competition applied to the wildly inappropriate setting of group dating. Part of it is probably rubbernecking. If I were to intellectualize it, I could call the show an anthropological study or a psychological experiment.

I still watch primarily because it would feel wrong not to at this point, and secondarily because I love to listen to recap podcasts. I love my internet friends in the Facebook corner of Bachelor Nation. I love listening to people who get me and my complicated feelings toward this franchise and who share my knowledge of the deep lore of Bachelor Nation.

Is it a problem that I spend three hours of my week listening to various podcasts review everything that happened in the two hours of TV I have also already seen? Maybe on the surface. But is consuming content about content not what sports culture is all about? What makes commentary on the game that is The Bachelor less valuable than commentary on the game of football? Why should analysis and critical fandom hold less merit for media marketed towards women?

I justify my behavior by classifying myself as a sports fan. In the online Bachelor circles I’m in, as we live scream our thoughts at each other via a Facebook thread, there’s a shared acknowledgement: this is super fucked, and our enjoyment of it is probably ethically questionable. I like to think that acknowledging this changes that, as if the way I’m watching is somehow more woke and enlightened. I’m sure football fans deal with the same dilemma as players of their sport continue to suffer concussions and other serious injuries at alarming and preventable rates.

The Bachelor is no longer a social activity for me but a parasocial one. I’ve always loved the discourse around The Bachelor — now, I just hear it from podcasters and strangers on Facebook instead of from my friends.

But this isn’t as lonely and sad and pathetic as it sounds. I don’t think my feelings about and dedicated fandom of the Bachelor are any less valid than those of Patriots fans who get rowdy at bars when the Pats lose or stats junkies who watch play-by-play analyses on ESPN. Such is the nature of cult media consumption — it’s addicting and polarizing and worms its way into you, whether you like it or not.

People Magazine no longer has the winning couple on its cover the week after a season wraps, because not even the readers of People Magazine are watching the Bachelor anymore. But still, I continue to buy those issues for the one- or two-page Bachelor/ette spreads that used to be the cover story. The small interview with the happy couple takes three minutes to read, and it does nothing to enhance my life or even my understanding of the season. But this is the sport I’ve put my heart into, the niche of American culture in which I’ve chosen to sit and watch the world burn.

— Magazine writer Sarah W. Faber can be reached at sarah.faber@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @swfaber.