It’s time for Australia to break up with The Bachelor
Jimmy and Holly found love on this year’s Bachelor but their happiness masks an unavoidable truth that can’t be ignored.
Reality
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OPINION
Dear Bachelor franchise,
We need to talk. After our last date – the lowest rating season of The Bachelor to date – I realise we just can’t make it work anymore. The time has come. We have grown apart. It is time for Australia to break up with you for good.
I know you’ll want an explanation, but it’s not just one thing. It’s everything! I mean, for a start, you’ve been serving us some pretty lame Bachelors. I still remember the first American Bachie, an exceptionally attractive multilingual businessman, Valedictorian, and Harvard graduate. And what do we Aussies get? Ex-rugby players with shonky haircuts and pilots who’ve been laid off during Covid.
Seriously, guys, if we wanted a single pilot, we could just swipe on Tinder. There are dozens of them on there at the moment. They have nothing else to do!
For another thing, Bachie, we’re tired of you going on about women who are ‘there for the wrong reason’. Do you think we haven’t been paying attention? ALL the women are there for the wrong reason! They always have been! Who on earth thinks, “Hmm. As I am keen for a committed relationship, I won’t try dating apps (again, which are teeming with pilots), or ask my friends for recommendations, but instead I will offer to get locked in a mansion with 22 other women and fight for the heart of a complete stranger who is not a Harvard graduate while being filmed for national TV?”
Please. If those women aren’t there for the fame or the giggles or the free alcohol, then they’re not quite right in the head.
And please don’t start arguing, ‘Oh, but people do find love on my show!’ You’re gaslighting us! We can use a calculator! Each woman in this series had a 4.3 per cent chance of receiving a declaration of love, and around a 50 per cent chance of that love enduring for longer than a few weeks. That’s a success rate of 2.15 per cent.
No hungry woman would go to a restaurant if there was only a 2.15 per cent chance of getting a meal, and no woman in search of love would be locked up in a ballgown for only a 2.15 per cent chance of scoring a boyfriend.
Also, Bachie, we’ve grown and changed. We were naive when we met you, but now we know too much. We know that your show is heavily scripted and that there’s a villain subplot in every series. We know that the Bachelor doesn’t really organise his own dates, and at least one will take place in a balloon.
We have come a long way from the early days of our relationship, when we still thought ‘reality TV’ represented reality.
And, you know, Bachie, you’re a bit of a misogynist. We’ve overlooked you being regressive and anti-feminist because you were so fun and entertaining. We’ve ignored the fact that you ritually humiliate women for ratings, because we couldn’t quite let go. But now your trope of the desperate single woman battling with other single women to get a ring from an average man is so banal it isn’t even subversive anymore.
Still, these are excuses just to give you some closure. The real reason Australia needs to break up with you is because we simply don’t care anymore. We can’t get excited about the dating life of some perfectly ordinary guy, even if he is wearing an expensive tuxedo he didn’t buy himself. We truly don’t care which of the 20 or 30 future Influencers he chooses to be his girlfriend. We won’t be buying the Vitamin Water they will spruik on their Instagram, or staying at the Queensland resort that sponsors their honeymoon.
We are over it. We’ve moved on. The relationship has run its course.
Bachie, it’s not us. It’s definitely you. You did not receive a rose. And we are never, ever getting back together.
Kerri Sackville is a freelance writer and author of Out There: A Survival Guide for Dating in Midlife | @KerriSackville
Originally published as It’s time for Australia to break up with The Bachelor