thorny

{boo! hiss!}

once upon a time i lived with boys. we will call them reed and carid, because those are their names. and those boys loved "the bachelor."

no joke.

they loved "the bachelor" with a love that is true. certainly with a love truer than anyone actually on "the bachelor" has ever experienced. every monday night there the three of us were, camped out on the couch (usually with a bunch of ice cream), watching the train wreck (so awful but can't. look. away.) that is reality tv dating.

i am pretty sure the season we watched was the one with dr. travis stork, though it also might have been "the bachelor: an officer and a gentleman" with andy baldwin. they all sort of run together. (though i know for sure it wasn't the one with the fake italian prince.) i do have a very clear memory of reed being really upset when the bachelor made out with five girls in one episode. i think the conversation went something like this:

reed: dude! that is just not classy.

me: seriously? welcome to the premise of the show. looking for love on tv is not classy.

reed: well, i wouldn't go that far.

sadly, i don't live with the boys anymore, and it is sad mostly because they always took out the garbage. and because i would really love to know what they thought of the finale of this season of "the bachelor." (i guess i could call them and ask, but i would feel sort of dumb. how could i feel any more dumb about calling them than i do about writing a whole blog post about "the bachelor," you ask? well, that's a good question.)

for those of you just returning from some sort of media hibernation, this season's bachelor, jason, turned out to be a total tool and proposed to melissa but then changed his mind six weeks later, dumped her on national television and went after runner-up molly, who decided to take him back with alarming rapidity. (check out my favorite recounting of the events here. there is also a pretty great jimmy kimmel interview with the beep-hole bachelor here.)

to quote reed, "dude! that is just not classy."

not that i should be expecting much from people who go on tv to find true love, of course, but i did find the whole thing rather infuriating. mostly, i think, because this selfish, leave-every-door-open compulsion is a pernicious presence in real life, non-tv dating as well, and it makes me so mad i could just spit meaningless neil lane diamond rings. you just don't get take-backs on stuff like that. you don't get to say, "i love you, i love you, i love you with all my heart" and then turn around to "follow your heart" somewhere else.

to quote jen: "he didn't follow his heart. he followed his weiner."

do you hear me, jason? if i meet you in real life, i will ignore you. and i mean it.

all of that said, though, it wasn't totally depressing. partly because it's just tv and it doesn't really matter. (easier said than done, my friends.) but mostly because, as we watched tv-true love go down in flames on the screen, we were stuffing jen's wedding invitations. solid proof that, in real life, real true love triumphs.