Some, though very few of you, may be aware of and even outraged by a recent piece of overwhelming news. The aforementioned few are followers of the competitive reality series, The Bachelorette. The upsetting news is the result of the season finale aired on Monday. Any REAL fan of the show and anyone who TRULY wanted Jillian (the eligible bombshell searching for love in a world that apparently shuns gorgeous brunettes) to be happy, would have wanted her to pick any of the other guys besides [Special] Ed. And anyone with any kind of grasp on even the subtlest intricacies of the concept of love would have been screaming at their television and throwing coasters when she turned down Reid for the second time. Now, if any guy is still reading this, please bear with me. This is not a rant about The Bachelorette. It is a brief exploration of some of those intricacies of love I was talking about. So on second thought, you might not want to read this anyway.
Alright, while on the surface it makes sense to say that the truest form of love is an intangible essence of the sub-conscious, unfettered by the restrictive definites of logic and sensibility, I must disagree. Sure, most of that can be true but there is also a point in which reality rears its ugly head and part of all that sunshiney fluff has to make way for intelligent thought. Shame, I know. But that is where The Bachelorette fails to bang on all cylinders. It introduces a desperate 'beautiful person' to twenty-some shots at a legitimate relationship, but plunges them all into a fantastical reality that doesn't really exist. Sure, the romantic stone streets of Spain and a riverside picnic in the Hawaiian rainforest may provide the perfect scenarios to experience the more tender aspects of a loving relationship, but they provide no insight into the harsher realities of such a complex thing as marriage.
For those of you that didn't follow the show, you may be ignorantly muttering, "Calm down. They fell in love, it's not like they're getting married!" Oh yeah? I see your ignorant mutter and raise you a triumphant sneer. The guy that wins gets down and proposes right on the show. The point of it is to end up with a ring! I know, right?! I think it's preposterous. The point I'm trying to make is that even though the girl spent eight weeks straight with the guys, they were under the perfect circumstances. Every date was a best-case scenario, every conversation recorded and observed. It was not real life. As much as love can be a supernatural, otherworldly experience, it exists in real life and has to follow the rules as such. But apparently the producers and participants of the show do not realize this.
If Jillian and Ed really do end up married, they will then be stuck in a legally binding contract to each other and only JUST learning about each other's less admirable quirks and qualities in more candid situations. It won't be the same as the fantasy world they lived in on The Bachelorette. Not until they are stuck together will it all come out. Five, ten, twenty years from now, she'll be another unhappy slob with a husband who sees maybe twenty hours a week in his own home. She'll be best buds with cookie sleeves and martini glasses. As she slowly lets herself go, they'll both realize they'd better make a kid before they're both useless. If not to at least produce an excuse to stay together. But unfortunately, his overstress due to work and her voided circulatory system lead to an absolute inability to conceive children. They decide to adopt an autistic Somalian boy (To be both humanitarian and fashionable, of course). When they see that their child spends each day drooling and inhaling sugar cookies, they finally recognize the hideous face of their truly pathetic mutual existence and cry themselves to sleep each night. In separate rooms. So in a last ditch effort to introduce some form of happiness into their lives, they throw a massive Christmas party and buy a dog for the young'un. In the middle of a rousing chorus of Little Drummer Boy, Ed suffers a violent heart attack. Yelling parum-pah-pum-PUM, he topples into the tree, knocking tinsel and balls and dreams scattered across the floor while his retarded child just stares and snorts down another cookie.
I'm going to pause the love story there. The point was that the whole decision making process of The Bachelorette is naive, uninformed, and ignorant of how love operates and coexists in reality. And somewhere in all that, a lesson can be learned and applied to our lives. I won't shove it down your throat any further. But try to let it float around in your mind somewhere. As real and self-sufficient as love can be, try to maintain a balance of reason and sensibility with it.
All the best,
- The Sad Blogger
