It’s time for Australia to break up with The Bachelor

Dear Bachelor franchise,

We need to talk. After our last date – the lowest scoring season of The single person by now – I realize we just can’t make it work anymore. The time has come. We have moved away from each other. It’s time for Australia to break up with you for good.

I know you’ll want an explanation, but it’s not just one thing. That’s all ! I mean, for starters, you served us some pretty lame singles. I still remember the first American Bachie, an exceptionally attractive multilingual businessman, valedictorian and Harvard graduate. And what do we get, the Australians? Former rugby players with shonky haircuts and pilots who were made redundant during Covid.

Seriously guys, if we wanted just one pilot, we could just swipe up on Tinder. There are dozens of them right now. They have nothing else to do!

For something else, Bachie, we are tired of you talking about women who are “there for the wrong reason”. Do you think we haven’t been paying attention? ALL women are there for the wrong reason! They always have been! Who the hell is thinking, “Hmm. Since I’m hungry for a committed relationship, I won’t try dating apps (again, which are full of pilots), nor ask my friends for recommendations, but instead I will offer to lock myself in. a mansion with 22 other women and fight for the heart of a complete stranger who did not graduate from Harvard while being filmed for national television? ”

Please. If these women aren’t there for the fame, the giggles, or the free booze, then they’re not quite right.

And please don’t start arguing, “Oh, but people find love on my show! »You enlighten us! We can use a calculator! Each woman in this series had a 4.3% chance of receiving a declaration of love, and about a 50% chance that this love would last more than a few weeks. That’s a 2.15 percent success rate.

No hungry woman would go to a restaurant if there was only a 2.15% chance of having a meal, and no woman looking for love would be locked in a ball gown for only 2.15% chances of making a boyfriend.

Also, Bachie, we have grown and changed. We were naive when we first met you, but now we know too much. We know your show is heavily scripted and there is a villainous subplot to every series. We know that the Bachelor does not really organize its own dates, and at least one will take place in a hot air balloon.

We’ve 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 forgot that you were regressive and anti-feminist because you were so fun and entertaining. We ignored the fact that you ritually humiliate women for evaluations, because we couldn’t quite let go. But now your trope of the desperate single woman fighting with other single women to get a ring from an average man is so commonplace that it’s not even subversive anymore.

Still, these are excuses just to give you some closure. The real reason Australia has to break up with you is because we just don’t care anymore. We can’t get excited about the love life of a perfectly ordinary guy, even if he’s wearing an expensive tuxedo that he didn’t buy himself. We really don’t care which of the 20 or 30 future Influencers he chooses to be his girlfriend. We won’t buy the vitamin water they produce on their Instagram, nor stay at the Queensland resort sponsoring their honeymoon.

We are above. We have evolved. The relationship took its course.

Bachie, it’s not us. It’s really you. You did not receive a rose. And we’ll never, ever get back together.

Kerri Sackville is a freelance writer and author of Over There: A Survival Guide for Dating in Your Forties | @KerriSackville