by Amy Kaufman
“This is what you deserve,” Soules told his date. “The princess thing works well for you.”
Back at the mansion, many of the other women were seething with envy. But no one was as upset about missing out on the date as Ashley Iaconetti. Before filming began, she’d gone to a boutique with her parents, who spent roughly $1,600 on four glitzy dresses for her to wear on the show. Determined not to let the money go to waste, she put on one of the gowns while Soules and Roper were at their ball and walked around the house, sulking.
On the episode, this behavior made Iaconetti come off as a tad unhinged. She complained about how she was a hopeless romantic, such a fan of Disney princesses that she was physically pained to have not been selected for the date. She was perplexed by why her fellow contestants weren’t equally upset—especially when they were being sent on dates where they had to camp in the wilderness and ride tractors in bikinis instead.
“I was like, ‘So, you’re telling me that you guys don’t want this princess-themed date as much as I do? Because this is the best date so far,’” she said now, a couple of years after the whole fiasco. “She had a fairy godmother and was literally wearing $5,000 shoes.”
Going on The Bachelor, Iaconetti explained, she was expecting to go on fairy-tale dates—the kind “you only see in actual Disney movies.” After all, these sorts of extravagant outings are a cornerstone of The Bachelor. On Jason Mesnick’s season, he let one woman wear $1 million worth of borrowed diamonds and flew her in a private jet to Las Vegas. Brad Womack, meanwhile, took one of his ladies on what he described as a Pretty Woman–themed date, letting her select a fancy dress and earrings to wear that she also got to keep, just like Roper. The couple drove to dinner in a Bentley Mulsanne and were later serenaded by the band Train—every woman’s dream, amirite? There was even another Pretty Woman outing on Sean Lowe’s season, this one actually on Rodeo Drive, where his date got to shop at the high-end store Badgley Mischka.
And let us not forget that time the Bachelor was, in fact, an actual prince.
Well, sort of.
In 2006, Lorenzo Borghese was named the Bachelor for the show’s ninth season. Borghese was born into an Italian royal family, though he’s not technically a prince: His father, Francesco, is the seventeenth prince of Sant’Angelo and San Polo. And when Francesco dies, his title will most likely be inherited by Lorenzo’s older brother.
But I mean, close enough, right?
It was for ABC, who decided to set Borghese’s entire season in Rome and marketed it with the tagline “This Fall, Your Prince Will Come.” Borghese—who owns a luxury pet-product company called Royal Pet Club—knew that the producers “wanted to go after the whole prince angle.” He didn’t take offense. He never thought he was that good-looking, so when he was offered the Bachelor gig, he was confused as to why a more handsome suitor wasn’t selected.
“And then they started talking about doing the show in Italy and talking about the family,” he remembered. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I get it, and I’m OK with it, because you guys need something different. You guys need a storyline. You guys need ratings. If you’re talking about a prince meeting his princess, I get it, and I’ll help you guys.’”
He knew, however, that he’d likely be lambasted by critics who took issue with his relationship to royalty. He’d grown up in Short Hills, New Jersey, attended college in Florida, and barely knew a word of Italian. His parents tried to teach him both Italian and French when he was a boy, he said, but when he started to stutter in English, a doctor suggested the foreign languages were confusing him.
Nonetheless, the women who came to meet Borghese in an Italian villa bought into the fantasy. “I think they thought that if we were to get married, we’d probably live in a castle and everybody would bow to us and we would do nothing but travel and just be admired by everyone we ran into,” he said.
The Bachelor tried to explain to the contestants that his lifestyle on the show was not reflective of his day-to-day back in the States. While the Borgheses do have their own chapel and crypt in Italy—and the family name is all over buildings in Rome—“in the US, I’m lucky to get a free beer,” he said.
“I think it was so powerful because when girls are young, they want to be a princess and they want to marry this magical prince,” Borghese said. “He’s pure as gold and not evil and has the best morals and has a castle and a black horse and has a great life and is the nicest person in the world. And that’s a fairy tale. In reality, that’s not what we’re like.”
Growing up, Iaconetti was one of those girls who latched onto those kind of fantastical tropes. She obviously loved Disney princesses, her favorite being Jasmine from Aladdin. But she attributes most of her romanticism to chick flicks—films she saw during her teenage years like The Wedding Planner that helped shape her vision of the ideal man.
“Watching those movies, I was in awe—like, that’s life right there,” she recalled. “That’s your goal: getting saved by a doctor when your shoe gets stuck, then going to a silent movie in the park, and he throws away all the M&M’s that aren’t brown. And he looks like Matthew McConaughey.”
Dr. Rebecca Hains, author of The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls through the Princess-Obsessed Years, has spent her career exploring how these media narratives impact girls and women. And the marketing of romance, she said, begins in toddlerhood.
“I think the Disney Princess brand capitalizes on that romance to such an extent that I don’t know if girls, at this point, are able to remember a time when they weren’t aware of those narratives,” she said.
It’s all part of what marketers call cradle-to-grave marketing. If you get a woman to love a brand in childhood—let’s say, Disney—that brand will go on to play a role during major life milestones. And then, when that woman has children, she wants her kids to enjoy Disney the way she did, experiencing a sense of nostalgia.
Take your adorable little daughter who is obsessed with dressing up as Snow White or Cinderella. She loves wearing her princess costumes so much that she refuses to take them off even during trips to the grocery store or the playground. And during these outings, she’s given incessant positive feedback: “Oh, you look so beautiful!” “Are you a little princess?” “Look how beautiful you are!” Getting that kind of external feedback on her appearance reassures your daughter that she’s valued by our culture, setting her up “for some pretty unhealthy ideas and behaviors” as she enters adolescence, Hains said.
So when the women on The Bachelor say they want to be a princess, or they want their life to play out like a fairy tale, what are they really saying?
Maria Tatar, who chairs the Folklore and Mythology program at Harvard University—and also happens to be my best friend’s mom—has taught fairy tales in her courses for decades. She defines them this way: A fairy tale is about persecution. There’s a villain, someone who is hunting the protagonist down and torturing her and making her miserable. Then, suddenly, there’s a reversal of fortune that typically results in a rise in social station.
And looks and appearances count for a lot in fairy tales, Tatar said. Because the stories focus heavily on plot and action, there’s often not much room for interiority. “So if you wanted to express goodness and virtue, you made somebody beautiful,” she said. “The minute you said, ‘Oh, Cinderella was so beautiful,’ or ‘Little Red Riding Hood was adorable,’ that translates into a kind of goodness. You know she’ll triumph in the end.”
To recap: A woman in a fairy tale is someone who is living a terrible life. Then—largely due to her beauty—she meets someone who reverses her miserable fate. She becomes wealthy and happy and is in love.
Like Hains, Tatar agreed that after being exposed to so many fairy tales at a young age, most women probably aren’t even aware of how powerfully those fantasies are preserved in the brain. “It all corresponds to a very basic, human desire to marry,” she said. “To fi
nd a partner who is at least your social equal, but preferably above you, who will somehow make you bigger and better and improve your lot.”
Money is key to this equation. When a woman on The Bachelor says she wants to be a princess, she’s not just saying she wants to feel beautiful—she’s saying she wants a designer gown and Christian Louboutin glass slippers and Neil Lane teardrop diamond earrings.
“Of course, nobody’s really a princess unless you literally marry a prince, so it’s all a really over-the-top way of playing dress-up and pretending,” said Hains. “It’s this really overt consumerism. A celebration of being able to afford all these things.”
And what about the whole “happily ever after” thing? What does that even mean? From a literary standpoint, Tatar told me that “happily ever after” was used at the end of stories just to give readers some comfort about situations that were without resolution. But nowadays, the phrase has come to represent far more. In Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage—one of Stephanie Coontz’s many books about modern relationships and family life—she wrote about how much expectation is laden upon the couple who wants to live “happily ever after.”
First, they must love each other deeply and choose each other unswayed by outside pressure. From then on, each must make the partner the top priority in life, putting that relationship above any and all competing ties. A husband and wife, we believe, owe their highest obligations and deepest loyalties to each other and the children they raise. Parents and in-laws should not be allowed to interfere in the marriage. Married couples should be best friends, sharing their most intimate feelings and secrets. They should express affection openly but can also talk candidly about problems. And of course they should be sexually faithful to each other.
Historically speaking, this type of union—one where emotion is prized over practicality—is still a relatively new concept. Those who go on The Bachelor might say they’re “desperate” to get married, but as Coontz writes, few modern women truly understand what concessions prior generations of females made when selecting a mate.
“Historically, desperate is agreeing to marry a much older man whom you find physically repulsive,” Coontz says in Marriage, a History. Desperate is turning a blind eye to prostitutes and mistresses, not being allowed to use birth control and subsequently bearing children, fearing punishment for not completing household tasks. “Women today may be anxious about finding a mate, but most could not even imagine being that desperate,” she concludes.
Such desperation started to wane about two hundred years ago, when the concept of what Coontz calls “the love match” first emerged. The love match came about when women were no longer forced to choose a partner for political or economic reasons. As women became increasingly less dependent on men, they were able to pay more attention to their hearts when choosing a mate.
Slowly, the old definition of love started to fade—a love based on the excitement of difference. “The kind of love where the woman loves the man because he’s these things that she is not—he’s stronger or older or wiser,” Coontz told me over the phone, just before she started on her nightly six p.m. glass of wine. When she hung up, she said, she planned to start her evening routine: cooking dinner while her husband read The New York Times aloud to her. Ladies: This woman has it all fucking figured out.
As Coontz was seemingly exemplifying in her own marriage, the more modern definition of love is based upon shared interest. “One of the challenges for modern women, I think, is how to make equality erotic,” she said. “Because for a hundred and fifty years, we have been trained to see inequality and difference as erotic. Difference as the basis of desire.”
Which explains, in part, why women might be drawn to go on The Bachelor, where gender roles are more clearly defined—and the man usually has the upper hand. Even on The Bachelorette, where a woman is handing out the roses, it’s the man who ultimately gets down on his knee at the end of the series.
So why, when women have been fighting for so long for equal rights, would a woman want to put herself in an environment where the man calls the shots?
To understand this, I spoke to a handful of sociologists about how young people today generally feel about marriage. Dr. Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist who consults for Match.com, conducts a study every year called “Singles in America” to try to get a bead on this. According to her most recent results, singles do still want to get married—but they don’t want to get married yet. Instead, the majority feel they need to have their career and finances in shape before they tie the knot. Even still, the ultimate prize is a partnership filled with romance, attachment, and commitment—marriage is more or less optional.
It’s part of a movement Fisher calls “slow love”—the idea that most singles want to take a veeeeery looooong time getting to know each other before walking down the aisle. So there’s a one-night hook-up. Then you move into friends-with-benefits territory. Eventually you move in together, learning everything about each other. You live together for maybe five years. Then it’s time to get married.
“As it becomes more possible to live a full and happy life and an economically stable life without being married, the standards for what a good marriage is are high, and people generally—I would say overwhelmingly—feel they have the right to leave a marriage or a relationship that doesn’t work,” agreed Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at NYU who studies gender, work, and family life.
But in this setting, Gerson noted, the notion of being “suffused in romantic love” is almost more powerful. If you’re not searching for a partner who can bring in a good paycheck or provide for your children, you better be feeling those butterflies hard.
“Marriage is no longer compulsory. It is a choice,” she said. “And so when people can live autonomously and don’t absolutely need marriage to survive, it’s a testament to how much we want intimacy and commitment that it remains as powerful and popular as it is.”
OK, so now that we know this, it would appear that The Bachelor is out of step with what modern-day women want from marriage. As we’re well aware, falling in love on the show is about as opposite of “slow love” as you can get. Not only is the courtship process sped up rapidly, but marriage is prized above all else. If you don’t get a ring out of the deal, you’re essentially considered a failure.
So what’s going on here? Are the contestants who go on the show—and the millions who watch them—really so wildly different from the so-called average young American? I don’t think so. Because while the rules of the dating world may be shifting, the media landscape—for better or worse—still propagates the idea that your worth as a woman is cemented when a man loves you enough to marry you.
Just think about the tabloids you see in the checkout aisle at the grocery store. Every single one has to do with relationships, marriage, divorce, and babies. After each season of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, the final couple always lands a photo shoot on the cover of People magazine by virtue of the fact that they are beautiful, in love, and (usually) engaged.
“It does very much reinforce the notion that if you’re not married, you’re a loser,” said Susan Douglas, a communications professor at the University of Michigan who explores sexism and feminist narratives in the media. “There are so many media texts that traffic in the idea that ‘you will find your soul mate, you will find true love, women should have a partner.’
“Then, on the other hand, there’s all this single-ladies stuff and a celebration of independent women and not necessarily needing a man,” she continued. “I think women are straddling a set of contradictions here that are much greater than [those that] many generations had to navigate.”
Jen Schefft knows this contradictory space well. When she and Andrew Firestone called off their engagement after just a few months, she received a ton of backlash—mostly from female fans—who were horrified that she didn’t try harder to make it work wi
th the heir of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.
“It was like, ‘Oh, he’s the perfect man and you couldn’t keep him,’” said Schefft, who was asked to be a guest on Oprah after she ended up with Firestone. “He’s the heir to a fortune. He’s good-looking. What’s wrong with you that you couldn’t keep him happy?”
The scrutiny only intensified when she went on The Bachelorette. Because at the end of the season, she was the one woman in the history of the show who—gulp!—rejected the marriage proposals of her two final men. At twenty-eight, Star magazine branded her a “spinster” for turning down both Jerry Ferris and John Paul Merritt. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, then a co-host on The View, said she thought Schefft would be single for the rest of her life.
“It definitely made me feel like, ‘Wait a second,’” Schefft said. “All this talk about feminism and girl power and how it’s OK to wait for the right guy? Sex and the City was still out then. It was supposed to be cool to be single. And I was hearing the complete opposite message. Always from women.”
Schefft went on to channel her frustration into a book, 2007’s Better Single Than Sorry: A No-Regrets Guide to Loving Yourself & Never Settling. In it, she talks about how difficult it was to be labeled “coldhearted, a man hater, a wretched, callous person” for her choices. “I was forced to defend myself for being single when all I was really trying to do was create a situation in which I would be happy,” she wrote. “What’s wrong with that? We shouldn’t feel the need to apologize for depriving other people of the fairy tale.”
But the whole endgame on The Bachelor is the fairy tale. And the first way to convey to viewers that a couple is headed toward happily ever after is by making sure there’s a very dramatic declaration of love.
