Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  “That shit is really invasive, and gives me anxiety just thinking about it,” he said, shuddering. “Having to hit the gas on my car and lose [paparazzi] cars and shit. That was not cool. I’d go to New York for some press tour and there would be cars at the bottom of the hotel and it was like, ‘Where can I go? I can’t go anywhere.’”

  Also working against a burgeoning relationship? The fact that seemingly every single in America now views the Bachelor or Bachelorette as an ideal specimen. After his turn as the star of the show, Italian Bachelor Borghese said gorgeous girls would flock to him anytime he turned up at a bar. Suddenly, overnight, his pool of potential mates had grown exponentially.

  “You’re like, ‘Wow. This is crazy.’ It’s almost becoming a rock star for a year or two, and you start thinking, ‘Do I really want to settle down with this person that I just met, or do I want to keep my options open?’” said Borghese, who—shocker!—broke up with his pick, Jennifer Wilson, only two months after the show started airing.

  While added temptation is certainly not helping anybody, there are bigger structural issues at play in the demise of most Bachelor relationships. Let’s return to our trusty marriage experts for a minute. According to Stephanie Coontz, it’s nearly impossible to form a lasting relationship in the time period allotted for filming.

  Back in the ’50s and ’60s, she explained, her research showed that considering your spouse a close friend wasn’t of utmost importance to most people.

  “The woman would say things like, ‘Well, he never really understood my feelings, but he was such a good provider and such a good dad.’ Or the guy would say, ‘Well, she didn’t understand my work, but she was such a good mom and she was so loving,’” Coontz said.

  But that’s no longer enough for singles looking for partners in the modern world. Coontz has found that most successful relationships these days are not only based on friendship but an understanding between the man and the woman that each will have their desires met equally.

  “So you need to negotiate, and some things can’t be negotiated,” she said. “You have to know each other well enough to know that you’re actually going to be marching in the same direction.”

  And getting to know each other? That takes time, and deeper conversation than “How amazing was our date today?” After you get past the overwhelming “I’m so attracted to you” vibe, you need to know whether or not you share the same values.

  “And you don’t give each other a quiz to say ‘What are your values?’” said Coontz. “You watch TV together instead of being on exciting dates and see if you have the same reaction to the same shows. Those sort of mundane things are very important predictors that get left out of it. You can’t figure those things out in ten days—or ten weeks—because they’re kind of inappropriate questions. You’ve got to feel them out and do enough things together so that you’ve gotten past the, ‘Oh, I’m so attracted to you! What a gorgeous date we just had.’”

  This explains why Catherine was so pissed when Sean pulled out the Big Serious Religion Question at the very last minute: because it didn’t feel appropriate for the setting. But he did ask the question, which is more than most Bachelors do. And maybe that’s why he and Catherine are still together.

  Why I’m a Fan

  DONNIE WAHLBERG

  There was a video that Jenny [McCarthy, my wife] posted of me crying while watching The Bachelor a couple of seasons back that got a lot of attention. But there’s probably 150 videos she has of me watching the show that she’s never posted of me crying and commentating at the screen and stuff like that.

  Look, I cry at weddings. Then I noticed that I cry at Broadway shows—no matter what the show is, I cry. I thought it was only certain shows—like, obviously Hamilton and Wicked during the curtain call. But I cried at freakin’ Spider-Man, so that’s a problem. His freakin’ web didn’t lower him down for the curtain call; he was stuck in the rafters—and I still cried. So when I started watching Bachelor, I never expected to cry—I was just enjoying it and getting a laugh out of it. But I started crying. Sometimes I cry at the proposal. I’ve cried at proposals that I wasn’t really happy about—the person I thought shouldn’t be the choice. I’ve also cried at certain people getting dumped. Certain people I feel are sincere in their emotions. It’ll affect me, for sure.

  I get a lot of head-scratching from my fans when I talk about Bachelor. Maybe 80 percent of my fans are female on social media, and even a lot of them are like, “Yeah, not watching. We’re watching something else.” But I don’t care. For the people who are into the show, we really don’t care if you judge us for watching The Bachelor. I don’t even call it a guilty pleasure, I just call it a pleasure.

  TV shows—especially something in the vein of The Bachelor—are not harmful to anyone. If you can have your psyche damaged by The Bachelor, then it’s already damaged. I absolutely think reality TV gets a bad rap. If you’re talking shit about reality shows, you obviously have some sort of anger issue and need to focus on other things.

  Look, there’s so much stuff out there that’s really intense. There’s twenty-four news networks that have all this drama and negative stuff going on. And here you have a TV show that is just fun and silly and shows the best and worst of dating. We’re not watching to see whether a nuclear bomb is gonna go off. We’re just watching to see if Guy A is gonna make a fool out of himself with Girl A. It’s real simple.

  I talk about The Bachelor a lot. On Mondays, when we’re shooting, I’m rushing the director to finish the scenes on Blue Bloods so that everyone in the crew who watches Bachelor can get home and make it in time to watch it. Around five o’clock, I’m gonna start rushing the director and suggesting other ways to shoot the scenes so we can be done by seven so everyone can make it home at eight to watch. I’m very honest about it. I will literally walk on-set after lunch and say, “OK, it’s Monday. Bachelor in Paradise tonight. Let’s get the hell out of here so everyone can watch it.”

  —Donnie Wahlberg, musician/actor (New Kids on the Block, Blue Bloods, Donnie Loves Jenny)

  CHAPTER 10

  Basking in the Afterglow

  Sean Lowe couldn’t wait to Google himself. He’d never experienced fame in his life, and now that he was one of the finalists on The Bachelorette, he knew that people would be gossiping about him online.

  So while he was still in the midst of competing for Emily Maynard in the Czech Republic, he snuck down to a hotel computer and searched “Sean Lowe Bachelorette.” Nothing too revealing popped up, but some sites had posted a few biographical details about him. He had an online footprint, and it was a thrill.

  He became even more excited when, after he was sent home, fans began to approach him on the street in his native Texas.

  “When people come up to you, especially on this show, they feel like they know you,” he said. “So when people would start coming up to me and saying, ‘Hey, we’re rooting for you, we love you on the show’—it was an exciting feeling. My life flipped upside down in a matter of days.”

  Since 2003, when Andrew Firestone and Jen Schefft became the first Bachelor couple to appear on the cover of Us Weekly, being a part of the franchise has translated into at least a momentary brush with fame. Nowadays, of course, not only do those in Bachelor Nation appear on the cover of tabloids, but they’re also constantly interviewed on entertainment programs and are accessible via Twitter and Instagram. It’s a lot of attention—and a lot of talking about a relationship that’s still being formed.

  “In a lot of ways, it’s so cool and fun to experience. Of course, going on a photo shoot for a magazine is great,” said Schefft, who jumped on Firestone’s back like a koala in their first Us Weekly cover, whose headline read “Why We Fell in Love.” “But people start to treat you like you’re an object. I wasn’t comfortable having my life exposed that much. I just wanted to go back and be a normal couple, but we could never really
be a normal couple.”

  Firestone, meanwhile, had grown up in the limelight due to his family name. He wasn’t as weirded-out by the recognition as Schefft was, because he was “used to people knowing who he was his whole life,” she said. Schefft, however, had moved from Chicago to San Francisco, where Firestone had his winery, and had trouble finding her footing after the show. In interviews, she felt like he would always have the perfect sound bite, even if that “wasn’t necessarily what was going on between us.” She began saying things about her fiancé in interviews that she had yet to even vocalize to him.

  “When you’re being interviewed, of course you’re going to say nice things about the other person,” she explained. “We could have had a huge fight that morning, but I’m not going to go and be like, ‘Well, he’s really pissing me off right now.’ So you say, ‘He’s amazing. We have this amazing relationship.’ Meanwhile, we’re still trying to get to know each other and talking like we’re so in love and know exactly where our relationship is headed when, really, we have no idea.”

  As a result of all the access, the public starts to feel like they know you—and that attention quickly starts to go to your head. After all, you can sustain the fame from one season of television for only so long. And that kind of attention? You start to get addicted to it. Just ask Chris Bukowski.

  When he opened his first sports bar in Arlington, Virginia—the Bracket Room—Bukowski had already been on two seasons of the show. His business partners kept encouraging him to return to television because the more relevant he was, the better the bar did.

  “People would be like, ‘All right, let’s go see Chris at the Bracket Room because we just saw him on TV,’” he said. “We’d host watch parties and marketed it as a female-friendly sports bar. We got national press—Good Morning America and Rush Limbaugh talking about my bar. It was crazy.”

  As a result, every night at the bar, fans wanted to drink with him. He was having fun, and when people were buying him drinks, the bar was making money. He’d gone to school for hospitality and always dreamed of opening a sports bar. Now, he lived above his own. He was at the peak of his popularity. “What I experienced that year was a lot of guys’ dream life,” he said.

  So what exactly did he experience? Girls pursuing him so aggressively, he said, that he even had to get a restraining order against one. Later, when he moved to a condo in Chicago, girls would “blow by security” and sit by his door, just waiting for him to come home.

  “Girls would be fighting over me,” he said. “It was sweet.”

  For a while, anyway. Because eventually, Bukowski started to realize that these women really only wanted to hook up with him because he was on TV. Even when he met women in more sober scenarios, he had trouble figuring out if they were interested in him because they were genuinely attracted to him or because he had 90,000 Twitter followers. And when he met the rare girl who wasn’t aware he’d been on television, she’d go home and gush to her girlfriends about the date, and one of her pals would say, “Oh, wait, that guy? Wasn’t he on The Bachelorette?” Once his name was typed into Google, nothing good ever came from it.

  So, yes—the show affecting your dating life? Definitely a bummer. But other veterans have experienced far more serious ramifications post-television. Remember Rozlyn Papa, who was kicked off The Bachelor after allegedly engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a producer? As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well back in Richmond, Virginia, where she was a single mom raising her son.

  Papa said that after The Bachelor wrapped, she found out that one of the teachers at her son’s school had posted nasty comments about her on an online forum.

  “She called me a slut. She said that I wasn’t a good mom. Really hurtful and untrue things,” she recalled. “I went to all of my son’s events and was very involved, so reading that was the most hurtful of all.”

  The teacher, Papa said, used her school email address, making herself clearly identifiable. So Papa went to the principal and the head of the school district, and the teacher was reprimanded and sent on a mandatory hiatus.

  The drama didn’t stop there. A few months later, Papa got a call from Entertainment Tonight, saying one of her former roommates had emailed the television show offering to “talk about personal things from college” in exchange for payment. She wasn’t even sure what the roommate was threatening to spill—she’d long had a tumultuous relationship with her parents, and she suffered from depression her whole life—“but just the fact that someone I lived with and thought I’d been friends with felt it was their place to talk about something so personal? It was really unthinkable to me.”

  Meanwhile, even in Virginia, strangers were taking her photo everywhere she went—Target, the movie theater. She felt like she had no privacy, like everyone was talking shit about her. She started leaving the house less and less, because it was the only place she felt safe.

  Finally, about two years after The Bachelor, she decided to make a major move: She packed her bags and went to Scotland. She wanted to be somewhere where no one had seen the show. If she just stayed there for a year, she surmised, by the time she returned there would be plenty of new franchise villains.

  Now she’s back in Richmond, where she does marketing for a real estate company. On her Twitter profile, she once described herself this way: “Survived The Bachelor. Climbed Kilimanjaro. Fought off a rabid raccoon. TWICE. Bring it, world.”

  “It’s a joke, of course, but it’s also not,” she said of the description. “Some people don’t ever get out of that mentality, like ‘Oh, I was on The Bachelor.’ I still get messages on Twitter all the time asking me about it, and I try to embrace it. It’s not who I am, but it’s something that I’ve been through.”

  Fortunately, Papa said, her son never had to deal with as much blowback as she did after her season aired. But Bukowski’s family was deeply affected by his television appearances. He said his father became obsessed with reading mean comments about him on the Internet, and he was so bothered by his son’s new reputation that they stopped talking for a while.

  “I kept telling him, ‘Dad, don’t read that stuff. If there’s a person that saves someone’s life, commenters will still talk crap about that guy on the Internet,’” Bukowski said. “But he started to believe what they were saying. And convincing him otherwise was hard to do, because I can’t change anything that’s already been filmed and aired. That’s a big reason why I kept going back on these shows: to try to fix my image and patch everything up.”

  Clearly, that never worked out the way Bukowski planned—because you can never control how you’re going to be portrayed on the Bach. That’s why he went on to make a public proclamation in 2015, announcing his retirement from the franchise. He knew if he revealed the plan to the world, he had to hold to it.

  Bukowski’s story isn’t rare. I talked to plenty of show vets who said their time on the franchise caused friction with their family. Craig Robinson, who appeared on Ali Fedotowsky’s season of The Bachelorette, stopped talking to his parents for four months after the show ended because they didn’t approve of his new girlfriend: a single mom who was also a Playboy Playmate. He met her because, as a result of the show, he was asked to judge a Playboy Bunny search for Playboy’s fiftieth anniversary. His love interest was one of the other judges.

  “It was something that never would have happened to me before the show—dating a Playmate. I’d never even had the opportunity to meet someone like that,” Robinson said. “I hadn’t had any problems with dating, but I’d say before I was looking for a more ‘normal’ girl with a real career. That changed, because I think at that time I became more interested in how a girl looked instead of how she lived her life.”

  Once he went official with the relationship on Facebook, his mom called him. She’d Googled his new partner and found her naked all over the Internet. Robinson scoffed, saying it wasn’t a big deal. />
  “She was like, ‘Is this really who you want to date?’” he said. “And we got to the point where she said, ‘I just don’t even think I can talk to you. You’re just not yourself.’”

  In addition to his new girlfriend, Robinson’s lifestyle had changed substantially. He was going to different parties every weekend, doing appearances at clubs for extra cash. He loved the feeling of walking into a club and having everyone ask him for pictures. “There’s people who say, ‘Oh, I would never do that,’ but [when] you’re offered that opportunity, it’s hard to turn down,” he said.

  But he was still working full-time as a lawyer, and balancing all his side gigs became increasingly more difficult. His law firm had been reluctant to let him go on The Bachelorette in the first place, fearing that he’d never return to his job after the show. And in a way, they were right. Because Robinson’s mind-set shifted after being on television. He questioned whether he even wanted to be a lawyer anymore.

  “I think everyone on the show kind of goes through that a little bit, because you feel like you’ve been given this opportunity, and all of a sudden you think you are somebody. To some degree, you’re famous now.”

  Ultimately, his attitude change became such a problem that he was let go from his firm. His boss thought he’d lost his focus at work, which even Robinson admits now was probably accurate.

  “I mean, I would have an event in Detroit on a Monday night, then I’d have to be in court on Tuesday morning,” he said. “So I’d go out on Monday, hop on a plane and be hungover as shit in court Tuesday morning. It was not a way to have a career, because it was just too much to balance.”

  In the years since, Robinson has recommitted himself to the legal profession and said he’s realized it’s really where his passion lies. He’s currently working at a firm in Philadelphia.