Does anyone follow ABC’s The Bachelor?

I used to.  I probably shouldn’t admit so, but I used to.  I used to like the show a lot.  But not in the way you should like something- because it fills a need or it satisfies.  Or because there is something fun or healthy about it.  I liked it because it was trashy, and at some level trashy voyeurism appeals.    And let’s admit it, ABC is onto women and junk and they do not disappoint with their scenes in hot-tubs and darkly-lit rooms.  With their shows of cat-fights and drama.  With their exploits involving good-looking men and beautiful women.

The Bachelor is the best of all that is raunch: and it is eaten up with a spoon.

Back when Anna was a baby, I was kinda struggling.  Who am I?  Where is my life headed?  Etc.  College was over, and with it life with tons of friends around.  Marriage was newly-wed marriage: good, but a little less secure and most definitely less gracious.  We were still figuring things out.  I can literally recall sitting in our office, emailing friends and thinking “My life has no glamour about it.  At all”.  Most of my friends were still dating and travelling, and I was home with a helpless baby and a husband taking classes at night.

Now no holds-barred, Anna was the beginning of the best for me but I didn’t realize it then.  I couldn’t appreciate what I had because I didn’t realize it for what it was or would be.  Or could be.  Or even,what it could not be. I had known a few years of getting dressed every day, working out when I wanted to, wearing make-up, dating a little.  I was so free and so put together.  It wasn’t glamor by anyone else’s standards, but looking back it was the most that I would ever have (and it certainly wan’t this).

I am convinced it is the glamour that appeals to women about The Bachelor.  The magnetism comes from flowers and beauty and exotic everything and romance and a love story.  But I think it must be the glamor more than anything that holds and transfixes.  And this almost embedding in someone else’s life and experiencing vicariously some of it.  After all, if the show was about a fisher-man living in a shack and seeking out a stout and weather-beaten and sturdy woman for a life of hard work, no one would watch.  Ratings would not even surface.  One piloted episode would be all there is of The Bachelor: Newfoundland Fisherman.

No one wants to feast on poverty and ugliness. 

Women love a good love story and The Bachelor promises what we all at some level want:  the rose-strewn fairy-tale.  With plenty of wealth and glamor to spare.

But nobody gets the fairy-tale.  The fairy-tale is riding off into wedded joy, without speed-bumps and hurt feelings and forgiveness.   And no one has that but we all want it.  Especially women.  We want to believe that there is a man out there who will never step on our toes or say unkind words.  Who will fly us over Maui in a helicopter and light thousands of candles and tell us how beautiful we are. Who will read our minds and souls, and bring us flowers and woo us until the day we die.

But unfortunately, we cannot get around the pesky issue of reality.  We are both married into baggage- each other’s and our own.   We settle into life together and have a baby or two and have to start to fight to have this beautiful relationship we want.  It is a shock how hard it can be at times.  On the day we get engaged and are all sparkly and filled with wonder, it is hard to imagine it can be very difficult to love some days.  That there are days or weeks where we will struggle to say even one kind word.  Or build up or encourage. 

The Bachelor ends at the fairy-tale.  With the roses and the sunset and the Harry Winston diamond.  But the show closes right where the rest of life begins.   Because the minute the camera cuts, reality will start.  The couple’s capped and whitened teeth will not save them from arguing.  Their beautiful bodies will not prevent them from being unloving.  Their diamonds and lavish vacations will not prevent what they want to avoid: reality.

I would not trade all the money in the world for my ex-bachelor husband.  This imperfect man with his flaws and sins.  In fact, I would not even want to repeat time and go back to dating him again: because who he is now is so much better.  I would never desire he and I to go back to the days of more money and more freedom: because the very reason we love each other better now is because we have fought to love without.

Without glamor.  Glamor only places a band-aid on the real issues of our hearts.  We cannot escape who we are by going to Maui.  What is in our hearts: the selfishness and the holding onto anger and the rude words and the unkind thoughts.  These parts of us are so embedded, they will follow us to the ends of the earth.  Mature love is built on giving up, not indulging or escaping.  By looking our sin full in the face and dealing with it and considering someone else better in the process.

The Bachelor ends there.  With the beginning of the real.  And the network knows that.  It knows full well that two days later the couple will be fighting over her hurt that he slept with two friends previous.  It knows that love no matter how sweetly professed, cannot be built on such grotesque selfishness.  It knows that mature love- true love will never take root on such a fragile foundation as polygamous dating.

And so the show wraps up, because no one wants to see the ugly.

So Jake Pavelka has his abs and his money and his job and his romantic side in full-force.  But I counter with: Give me big and sacrificial love.  Give me REAL love.  The kind that teaches and explains and works through life.  Give me love that is mature enough to move beyond being… a Bachelor.