In other words: it seems pretty clear that Channel 10 is actively trying to kill the franchise with this season.

Everything from the airtime to the schedule to the fact that the first two episodes were mysteriously (and totally definitely on purpose, why would you think otherwise) uploaded on TenPlay more than a full week before the premiere suggests that the network is trying to usher the Bachieverse gently into that good night. The vibe is very much “not with a bang, but with a whimper” (despite the promise that this season will contain fantasy suites, ie the franchise-approved opportunity to bang, which has not existed in the Australian show for a full decade).

Much has been made of the fact that this season is all about exploding the format and throwing new shit at the wall to see if it sticks. There’s the fact that there’s three Bachelors, for one: the most Bachelors that there has ever been in any iteration of the show globally. There’s the fact that it’s on the Gold Coast. There’s the fact that the tone is wildly different to what we’ve seen in the past.

Perhaps, if we were very charitable, we could read the fact that this show is being rushed out in January and broadcast over (by my calculations) a three week period as a version of this format-explosion. We could even read the totally-released-on-purpose “exclusive preview” episodes as a version of this, as whetting the appetite of the viewers and luring them in. If we were very, very charitable, we could see it as an admission that streaming and on-demand viewing is where the younger audiences are, moving away from the reliance on Nielsen ratings (which privilege older audiences) as a measure of success.

(This would not be without precedent. Australian Love Island was solely a streaming show in 2022, broadcast on 9Now, in, I assume, recognition of the fact that its younger audience simply do not watch free-to-air TV.)

But alas, I am not that charitable. You don’t leak early episodes of a show which is (in theory) one of the last bastions of appointment TV unless you’re trying to kill it. You don’t dump it all in three weeks and then run away screaming unless you’re trying to kill it. You don’t put it up against the fucking tennis unless you’re trying to kill it.

Seriously. While the US Bachelor has, for the last several years, premiered early in January, the context is wildly different. January is the densest month on the Australian sporting calendar. You don’t premiere a show there unless you’re actively trying to cull it from your roster.

This is a pessimistic beginning to my recaps of this season, but I think we have to start from a place of pessimism, because that’s what just about every decision made by the network is pointing towards. Everything around the show is giving off enormous whimper-not-bang energy, and it’s impossible not to read it in that context.

However, this is in itself quite interesting, because a lack of expectations can also come with a sense of freedom. The Bachelors is not burdened with the weight that our last Australian Bachie season came with, where, along with being the first ever First Nations and the first ever bisexual Bachie, Brooke Blurton was expected to save the entire franchise. Everyone expects these men and this season to be a flop.

Basically, I’m wondering whether we might find ourselves in a sort of The Producers situation here. Could the fact that the network seems to be actively trying to murder the show accidentally turn it into a success despite itself?

I suspect the answer is going to be no. We might have had a year off, but my instinct is that Bachie fatigue persists still – that we never really recovered from 2020, where they stacked Bachelor in Paradise, a lacklustre season of The Bachelor and an absolutely fucking terrible season of The Bachelorette on top of each other and burned the whole audience out. However, I have been known to be wrong before, so…

…let’s see.

And in the spirit of seeing: let’s check out the season premiere and see what’s going on.

Because guess what???

I think this season might be…

…good?!

It’s early days, but this is easily the most entertained I’ve been by a Bachelor season since the days of the Astro Bach. Some of this is down to the format explosion, but some of it comes down to the fact said explosion has caused them to return to a basic storytelling principle: you can’t become invested in a love story unless you’re invested in the characters.

In that vein, let’s meet our three Bachelors.

Jed (25): my goodness, there is a lot going on in Jed’s introduction. He is a drummer. He likes loud prints and tattoos. He also likes Jesus (“you can’t judge a book by its cover”, he tells us, ignoring the fact that the cover is a threshold of interpretation, and – okay, you didn’t come here for my lecture on paratext).

Jed begins from a place of insecurity and vulnerability, talking about how he was bashed at school for painting his nails. This tone continues throughout the episode. It is often deeply annoying – he negatively compares himself to Felix on several occasions, and it gets a bit much – but it also makes him the most relatable of the Bachies. I wouldn’t have picked this knockoff Machine Gun Kelly as our POV Bachie, but of the three men, Jed is, I contend, our perspective character.

Felix (27): Felix is the closest to the archetype of a Bachie that we have: tall, white, dark hair, teeth so white it’s almost uncanny, a little dead behind the eyes. He’s another one of our professional sportsperson Bachies – he’s a basketball player – but he’s transitioned into some kind of corporate job.

The narrative they’re trying to build around Felix reminds me a bit of the one they built around Georgia Love: he’s always put his career before relationships, but now he’s here to focus on love. But there’s another nuance, because Felix openly admits that “for me, it’s always been a hookup culture” and that he’s never been in a relationship. Whether or not Felix is a reformed player or simply a player is going to be one of the questions of the season.

Thomas (35): I suspect I would have liked Thomas a lot more if I knew nothing about him going in. On the surface he seems nice enough: he’s handsome, he’s Italian, he describes himself as “very romantic”, which is “in his DNA”.

But there’s also a lot about fitness and wellness and transformation in his intro, which is utterly unsurprising – if you go digging even a little into his bio, you’ll find out how deeply entwined he is in a wellness-flavoured MLM.

Also, he looks exactly like Jonny from Season 3 of UK Love Island, who I have never forgiven for what he did to Camilla. Thomas has a lot of ground to make up with me.

So: these are our three boys. Now, let’s delve into the format changes.

There are quite a few. As Osher tells us in his opening spiel, there’ll still be dates and roses (and Osher), but almost every other aspect of the franchise will shift in some way.

Some of these changes are, I think, unnecessary. They make much of the fact that the visual language is different. In their move to the Gold Coast, they’ve also ditched the fairy lights and the candles. While I can understand wanting to give the show a different look, this visual language is pretty key to Bachie, and I don’t think they needed to ditch it altogether.

They also talk about “raising the stakes”, by which they mean that the men will be actively encouraged to propose. When Osher first greets them, he presents all three of them with engagement rings (which they had no say in the design of? Neil Lane would never).

I hate this. I hate this. I think the fact that the Australian version has historically not rushed people to propose is a great thing. Firstly, it doesn’t fetishise marriage through suggesting that’s the only way a relationship can be serious; and secondly, it’s probably one of the key factors in the Australian franchise’s comparative success rate compared to the US (we’re at 5/9 Bachelors + winners still together, they’re at a whopping 2/26). There’s no need for this kind of pressure.

However, a lot of the changes they’ve made are great. For example:

1. Rather than 30 women heading straight into the mansion, the three boys go on a series of blind dates all around Australia. They each have ten roses. If they like their date, they can give her a rose; if not, farewell. That means they enter the mansion with a pre-existing level of emotional engagement.
2. They have made the absolute first change I would have recommended if they had hired me to consult: all the first dates are organised by the women, not the Bachies. This gives us a much more immediate window into their personalities.
3. The three men are going to discuss their relationships with each other! This was a massive, massive missed opportunity in the Elly and Becky season – why cast sisters if they barely speak to each other? what’s the value of multiple Bachies if they’re not going to debrief? – so I’m really glad they’ve learned from their mistakes here.

These last two in particular are going to give us great opportunities for narrative and character development. They’ve dropped the ball totally in these arenas in past years, so I’m delighted with what they’ve done here. It has the potential to be really interesting.

And, once we get past Osher telling the boys the rules of the game, this first episode is really interesting. I was skeptical about this pre-mansion dating ritual, but I was very pleasantly surprised by how well it works.

To expand – the first blind date we see is one of Jed’s. He goes on a blind date with a blonde woman named Catelyn: a psych graduate who “hates small talk” and immediately dives into big “why are you on this show?” questions. Jed loves it and offers her a rose, but she rejects it, because she’s not feeling any chemistry.

This provides us some neat character information for Jed. He doesn’t react particularly well – “I thought I was the one making those decisions,” he complains, in probably his most grating moment of the episode – but beyond that, it also destabilises him in an interesting way. The next series of dates he goes on are all lacklustre and he doesn’t give out any roses. It really makes him think about what he wants and what a connection even is, so when he does meet some women he likes, he’s able to explain and articulate it much more clearly.

Jed’s ultimately the pickiest of the three Bachies – he only gives out nine roses, and ends up with a spare he donates to a desperate Felix – and it’s set up beautifully from this initial incident. It’s very efficient reality TV storytelling.

Here’s a quick dramatis personae of some of the women Jed will be dating in the mansion:

Jasmine: she utterly destroys Jed in a tantric yoga class (he is… not good at it), and gets Jed’s first rose after his false start.

Bella: setting up a tattoo appointment for a blind date is a bold move, but it works – Jed loves it, and they get matching tattoos of spatulas (because “spatula” sounds like “Bachelor”).

Angela: a classic wifey. She meets Jed at a tennis court because that was how her grandparents met, and Jed falls for her hard. “Can I kiss you a bit?” he asks her, and they pash.

Tash: she’s a self-described “girly girlie” with “standards as high as her heels” who turns up with two small dogs in a pram. 100% she’s going to be the season villain.

Alésia: our other classic wifey, she is to me the clear frontrunner. She takes Jed on an ice skating date where he falls hard – both over physically (multiple times), and for her. They pash mightily, and Jed says he “would rather be on thin ice with her than solid ground with anyone else”.

Let’s switch over now to Felix. His first date is the only one which goes well, in that he likes the lady, she likes him, and he gives her a rose. However, this first date is also very ~sexy~, and that sets the tone for what we can expect from him. Felix, our reformed(?) player, is going to be The Horny One.

There’s also a hint that Felix might be a bit of a villain. It’s subtle in this episode – not much beyond some of the women he rejects saying things like “he seemed like a bit of a dick, to be honest” – but watch this space. We’ve had seasons before where the Bach ultimately turned out to be the villain (think Blake Garvey). It makes sense that, when you have three of them, you’d want to explore the broader spectrum of heroism/villainy.

But let’s pin that for a moment and meet some of the ladies who will be dating Felix:

Krystal: Felix’s first date, she sets the horny tone. Their date is no hands/no feet body-painting – ie. they just smash their paint-covered bodies together – and their inevitable pash-fest results in the franchise’s first acknowledged on-screen boner.

Tilly: she takes Felix to play cricket, but mostly they just pash.

Jessica: she’s a dancer, and tries to teach Felix how to dance, because “girls love a guy that can move their hips”. In case that wasn’t on-the-nose enough, she clarifies that she means for sex.

Abigail: she seems like a candidate for the quirky girl edit (she carries her cats everywhere in a backpack) but Felix is super into her. She’s his last date and he’s out of roses, so he calls Jed and begs him for his last unspoken-for rose.

And finally, let’s talk Thomas.

It’s hard to know what to make of Thomas yet – unlike Jed, who gives us a way in to the narrative, Thomas seems quite closed. He struggles with rejecting the women he doesn’t vibe with: the first date of his we see is with a woman named Anna, where he awkwardly tells her he doesn’t feel the connection, then tells us that it broke his heart and he felt like a douchebag.

This is a sentiment he goes on to repeat several times. I think we’re supposed to read Thomas as both very romantic and very sensitive, but it hasn’t quite coalesced for me yet.

We only really meet two of the women he’ll be dating, so I think it’s a reasonably safe bet they’re his frontrunners.

Kiki: their date is life-drawing – although given it’s a first date, they both keep their underwear on. Thomas is so compelled by her “aura that radiates love” and her “sexual and spiritual pull” that he only ends up drawing one line.

Leah: she self-describes as “an old school romantic in a hookup culture”. She takes Thomas out on a punt where she gives him a little speech she’s written in a box, and he’s so into her that he says “he can see her soul through her eyes” and starts crying to his producer.

We end the episode with the thirty(!) women entering the mansion in the Gold Coast, and being OMG SO SHOCKED to figure out there are three Bachies. This is a bit underwhelming tbh, given the dramatic irony – we, the audience, already know, and there’s limited fun to be had in watching them figure it out – but this was a hell of a compelling episode.

Will this save the franchise? Probably not. But did I have a great time? Absolutely.

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this recap – thank you! I assume that means you enjoy my writing, so don’t forget that I’m the author of a couple of reality TV rom-coms. Here For The Right Reasons (which is about a Bachelor-esque lead falling for a contestant he eliminates on the first night) is out now; while Can I Steal You For A Second? (which is about two contestants falling in love with each other instead of their Bachelor-esque lead) will be out in April and is available for pre-order.

I’ve heard some very good things about Mariana Zapata, and she’s on my list of authors to try. When Kaetrin flagged to me that Dear Aaron has a half-Filipina heroine, I figured it would be the perfect excuse to finally read Zapata’s work.

Let me spare you the pain. If you’re keen to try Zapata’s work, don’t start with this one.

I was warned that Zapata specialises in slow-burn romances, so I was prepared for the romance to take a bit of time. But this isn’t what happens in Dear Aaron. There are chunks of this story that could have benefited from extensive developmental editing. The bones are there to tell a good story with these characters in their situations — Aaron in the military and unsure of what he wants from life, and Ruby trying to overcome her fears in order to embrace possibilities for the future — but it doesn’t feel like the structural work was done to do the characters justice, or to build a cohesive story arc.

The story starts with an email exchange. I’m not a huge fan of the epistolary style in romance because it’s very difficult to execute well. Ensuring that the heroine and hero have distinct voices is tricky, and it’s made trickier when they’re communicating via email, then via instant messages, and then finally in person. In my experience, authors underestimate how difficult it is to write emails into a story and the so-called emails rarely sound like actual emails.

My first warning that this book and I wouldn’t get along was when I realised that the heroine, Ruby Santos, is 23. Based on what I had read up to that point, I had mistakenly assumed that she was a teenager. Oops. She’s the kind of milquetoast heroine that works very well if you’re new to the genre and still in the honeymoon phase of devouring all the books as fast you can, but when you’ve been reading in the genre for decades, it’s just … frustrating. There was potential for Ruby to be more than a collection of tropes and romantic shortcuts, but Zapata never explores them.

Ruby is introverted, hates confrontation, and doesn’t like to take risks. She’s the perfect canvas for a great romance, but the stakes in Dear Aaron are never high enough to be interesting. Zapata relies on genre shortcuts — the smirk, if you like — in lieu of a coherent character arc. If you dislike heroines who burst into tears just so the hero can express tenderness, this isn’t the book for you. Don’t get me wrong: I love genre shortcuts, but they have to be reinforced by actual character development. I didn’t feel as though either character grew much at all.

Aaron is slightly older than Ruby, but again, my initial assumption was to imagine him in his early-20s. He still had that blokey kind of air about him, which — okay, I’m fine with that, and I actually do love a character arc that pushes the hero to find a sense of direction in life. Aaron has been in the military for a while, and Ruby starts emailing him as part of a penpal-type initiative. The beginning is kind of interesting, but it soon devolves into info dumping and minutiae.

Some of it feels downright careless. Take, for example, some of the events that are mentioned in Aaron and Ruby’s emails. Let me see if I can remember this, so you can all tick off your diversity bingo cards: POC background (although she has blue eyes, so whatevs), heart condition, cancer scare, autism, sexual harassment. Did I miss anything? And the thing is, this all would be fine — great even — if these nods to diversity actually went somewhere. Sadly, they did not.

Also, for reasons I never really understood, the story is set between 2008 and 2009.

Anyway, the writing picks up when Ruby and Aaron move from email to (online?) chat. Without the temptation to indulge in pointless character descriptions, Zapata’s writing becomes much more snappy and fun. I particularly love the toilet humour:

This book is redeemed by toilet humour. This entire exchange is hilarious. But legit question: who says rectum instead of a(r)se? pic.twitter.com/uKM8KLLxTa

— Kat (@BookThingo) January 29, 2018

Finally, it feels like the characters are actual people, and I can get a sense of that slow burn that Zapata is famous for. At around 35% on the Kindle, I felt the first fluttering of interest in the romance. And then … it kind of faded away in boredom. There’s something very uneven about the pace in this book that not even the glorious poo jokes can hide.

When the story takes us out of the epistolary style and into Ruby’s POV, I get a better handle on what other readers love about Zapata. There’s a lot of internal angst in Ruby’s POV. A lot. She’s in her head all the time, and because she doesn’t have friends, there’s no relief for me, the reader. (And that’s another thing: she’s 23 and she has no friends. She’s into cosplay and she has no friends. That is generally not a solitary hobby. I mean, it’s not impossible, but I find it very hard to believe. Then again, she’s super boring, so…) I kept hoping for dialogue because Zapata’s writing improves noticeably when people are talking to each other.

Ruby and Aaron fiiiinally meet up when Aaron flies her to Florida to spend a few days with him, his buddies, and a girlfriend and sister (of the buddies). Look, let’s not even go through how problematic that is. It’s romance. I’m happy to go with this plot. But omfg Ruby was TEDIOUS AF from the moment she arrives at the airport and can’t find Aaron.

Fortunately, Aaron becomes so much more appealing — maybe because we see him from Ruby’s POV, but probably because Zapata is forced to show us what he feels. He has expressions! He broods! He gets cranky and quiet and we all know it’s because he’s slightly jealous! I love this stuff, and what little there is of it is pretty good. Or maybe I was just grateful to have crumbs of feelings after enduring Ruby’s pointless angst. Whatever, I’ll take it.

But every time I try to sink into the story, something like this breaks the mood:

Like what does this bit even mean? So many wasted words, signifying nothing. pic.twitter.com/B3I0rztjG5

— Kat (@BookThingo) January 29, 2018

Finally, I get to the part about Filipino cuisine that motivated me to read this book in the first place. Ruby’s dad is Filipino, and while I love the fact that Zapata wrote a half-Filipina heroine, there’s nothing in the story that makes this relevant. The only time her Filipino background comes in handy is when she tells Aaron and his friends about some of the more confronting dishes that we eat. As I wrote on Twitter, this stuff doesn’t really bother me. I’ve had my fair share of telling squeamish friends about balut and isaw. But I can see why a Filipino reader would be upset that the only seeming reason to have a Filipina heroine is for this one not-exactly-complimentary scene.

And did I mention that Ruby has blue eyes? The fates would have to align pretty spectacularly for that to happen.

There’s also a bit where another character tells Ruby that she “can’t really tell you’re Filipino, except for the shape of your eyes”. Let me count the ways this is problematic: 1) the character who says this is also a POC character; b) RUBY HAS FUCKING BLUE EYES FFS; c) there is no eye shape that will distinguish you as a Filipino. I actually think that this is the part most likely to offend Filipino readers. But you know, we’re also just really hungry to see more of us in books, so it’s not going to be terrible for everyone.

Anyway, back to the romance, which is finally smouldering, except each time you think maybe it’s hot enough to make smores, it suddenly feels like I’m reading a teen romance again.

At 89% this happens. She has already told him she loves him. And yet still no pashing. This book is set in topsy-turvy world. pic.twitter.com/kroq10GUMp

— Kat (@BookThingo) January 30, 2018

Guys, he’s a 28-year old guy on leave from military service, hanging out with a girl who has already told him she likes him, and he still has NOT KISSED HER ON THE MOUTH. This is not a slow burn, you guys. This is terrible pacing and overindulgent I don’t even know what.

Look, I concede it’s possible they kissed and I missed it because I was so bored I was skimming fast. But I doubt it. And it’s so frustrating because Aaron is actually very charming when they start getting touchy-feely.

Okay, this is cute. I just wish he’d get on with it already. The heroine is so needy. pic.twitter.com/vUZUyq0zT2

— Kat (@BookThingo) January 30, 2018

And finally — at 96%!!! — these kids finally have sex. And it’s even kind of hot in a generic sort of way if I just skim past Ruby’s internal hand-wringing while it’s happening. But then…

So at 96% the sexy times begin. It’s not the best but okay, it’s passably hot. And then this happened and I question everything about this book again. WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN??? #helprubyfindhervagina pic.twitter.com/gB9swu76MR

— Kat (@BookThingo) January 30, 2018

That line is horrible, and I read it over and over again to be sure that I was reading the words properly.

And then the book ended. And you know what? Ruby is still wringing her hands because even after the great sex, she’s already worrying about the end of the relationship. WITH ONLY AN EPILOGUE TO GO. I can’t even with this heroine.

By the time I finished the book, it felt like I had been trolled. So much waffle, so little build-up, such a paltry pay-off. The story had sweet moments, but for the most part it was boring. No, I don’t mean slow-paced or with a slow burn. I mean boring. There are similar but much better stories on Wattpad, and they’re free.

I have read all my life and found solace and comfort and affirmation and new ways of thinking through my books. I was an Army Officer for nearly a decade and then a Social Worker, all the time dealing with increasing ill health and disability, including surviving two brushes with cancer. I have spent many years volunteering as a health consumer advocate and working to improve the care of people with chronic illness. I love living in the inner west with all the people out and about to chat to on the bus. I spend my time in op shops looking for things to craft and books to read and vintage clothes to wear. Every day deserves an outfit and a new book. @MerrianOW

The Art Gallery of NSW is showing an overview of the work of 20th century Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: Love and Pain. I have enjoyed Frida’s work vicariously through the internet and the mass consumer reproductions of her paintings and images on things that for many women are a sort of icon. Seeing the pictures and other art pieces in the exhibition was a revelation, though my little brooch is still precious to me. The internet images, the photos in books and the face on a shopping bag do not show how these pictures glow and seem so deep you could part the jungle leaves and walk into them.

Frida Kahlo’s work is about female embodiment, injury and disability, and child-bearing loss, as well as exploring her turbulent relationship with Diego (Frida said Diego was the second great accident of her life). Her art is a mirroring opposite to her husband Diego’s work in intensity, scale and focus. I think for Frida the personal was always political and her body is where this was realised.

Some of the smaller exhibition pieces are painted on foot square tin sheets just like traditional Mexican folk art religious votives, painted to give thanks for a blessing or recovery. I thought of her engagement with her selfhood and suffering as being offered up when I saw this. The detail on pieces such as the painting Diego On My Mind (oil on Masonite, 1943) has fine black root tendrils, showing how Diego is rooted throughout her being, that are almost invisible in reproductions and on line images. The backgrounds and depth of the paintings were full of life and glowing.

Frida Kahlo’s art has always spoken powerfully to me, as a woman living with chronic illness and disability. It expresses what it is like to be caught and limited; of wanting to transcend our lived reality at the same time as acknowledging how our bodies are our worlds and shape our beings. As Frida became more disabled and ill, her physical capacity to paint was limited, yet she continued to make art using writing paper and sepia ink, always working to understand and to name for herself her situation.

I overheard one attendee call Frida a narcissist — something, I reckon, Diego and other male artists may be named but not accused in the same way. I walked on thinking … yes, when you are ill your body demands that your focus is only on it, that you filter the world and your choices through your body’s limits and potentials. Looking at Frida’s work I am all-in for narcissism as a female virtue that carves out space, time and the right to the internal, lived life, to show her pain and to say here I still am and that has value. I think her literary counterparts are the Bronte Sisters.

The exhibition contrasts Frida’s glowing work, which to me uses the skills of a miniaturist on bigger scale, with Diego’s paintings, which are matt and flat, using broad strokes and a muted palate of colours. I thought Diego’s work was very much of its time and, for example, in the AGNSW you can see Australian artists of the era using similar colour and techniques.

In their lifetimes, Diego Rivera was considered the greater artist, and like the man, his work was massive and public in scale. His murals of Mexican life were part of the political discourse of the pre-WW2 era. Both Diego and Frida were of the left and engaged with the Communist Party, befriending Leon Trotsky when he was in exile in Mexico.

Both their styles and intention is art as narrative. The story that their paintings tell is there to be read. Frida’s work, for me, questions the standard splitting of the private and public spheres of living through her focus on the body, which is present simultaneously in both social places. The photographs of Frida and her life are an important part of the exhibition. Through the regional Mexican costumes she wore and the face she showed in public, Frida performed as well as made art.

At face value, Frida’s very complicated love life and complex relationship with her husband may not offer a direct link to the romance novels we love to read and critique here on Book Thingo and all our favourite social media platforms. Yet, as I walked the exhibition thinking about the romance genre’s HFN and HEA being a discovery and owning of a true self, and that this is achieved through relationship lived through bodies, I didn’t feel that the connection is too much of a stretch. For Frida Kahlo, the most personal sphere of living was where the world was made real, and that is the same message for the romance genre, too.

There are not a huge number of the complex and surreal paintings that are so recognisably Frida Kahlo’s work, but there is a strong narrative arc to the exhibition. The sepia ink work, the letters and photographs, are an important part of the story but a little hard to spend time with in the crowded corridor-like space of the exhibition (there is timed entry). I was disappointed in the quality of the postcards available in the AGNSW shop. I thought the colours of the paintings quite muddy in the reproductions, washing Frida’s pictures of much of their life. The Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: Love and Pain exhibition is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Australians to see the real work of these defining 20th century artists.

Alas, I am not strong enough not to give you all my thoughts about this show – especially as it has strayed into a territory in which I have even more expertise than usual (and thus I can’t believe they didn’t call me to consult even more).

When people ask me what my PhD was on, I usually say “romance” as a kind of quick and dirty answer, but if you want to get more specific: I wrote about representations of virginity loss and the way they intersect with popular romance narratives.

My PhD thesis – which became my book The Consummate Virgin – focused on female virginity loss, but you can bet that I picked up quite a bit about male virginity loss narratives along the way (classic occupational hazard). So let’s talk about Wesley.

First thing’s first: Wesley is not the first virgin Bachelor. In the US, we had what we might call an original flavour virgin Bachelor in Colton Underwood in S23 (or in his words, a “full virgin”). While he entered into and maintained a relationship with one of his contestants after the show (Cassie Randolph, for whom he famously jumped the fence, and who infamously took out a restraining order on him after they broke up), he later came out as gay, saying, “The truth is I was a virgin Bachelor because I was gay, and I didn’t know how to handle it.”

There’s also been a born-again virgin, Sean Lowe of S17 – now one of the most popular figures in US Bachelor Nation, largely because he’s one of the vanishingly few Bachelors who’s still together with his winner (Catherine Giudici, with whom he now has three children, and with whom he waited until marriage to have sex).

For Sean especially, virginity was framed through a religious lens. It was also framed, for the most part, extremely positively – as a sign of decisiveness and restraint and respect, for himself and the women. I have an inkling, given how Colton was framed, that some of this miiiiight have come about because he had fucked before and then stopped – they sort of had their cake and ate it too there, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute – but for the most part, his virginity was key to his heroism.

This is very much not what seems to be happening with Wesley. The main reason surely has to be the different levels of religiosity in Australian vs US culture, but there’s a few things going on here, so let’s unpack it.

In her book Virginity Lost, sociologist Laura M Carpenter argues that there are, broadly speaking, three main sociosexual scripts around virginity loss – that is, people tend to view it in one of the three ways:

As a gift: here, virginity is something expressly valued, and ideally, one’s partner should understand the value of the gift being bestowed upon them.

As a stigma: essentially, the inverse – virginity is something to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible, because “virgin” is seen as a stigmatised identity.

As a rite of passage: here, virginity loss is the next step in a logical and natural progression, both in terms of a relationship and also broader sexual maturation.

If we’re going to generalise extremely broadly, noting that this is all very problematic and heteronormative, the first script is typically gendered female and the second male. Culturally, we tend to assume that women will place more value on their virginity while men can’t wait to get rid of it – even as, again speaking very broadly, we drift ever closer to the rite of passage script as the main one we socially endorse.

Wesley, we can assume, as a 32yo male virgin, lives somewhere between the gift and the rite of the passage scripts: he both values his virginity and sees virginity loss as a rite of passage coming after marriage. This already poses a bit of an image problem for him (in a wider, non-religious culture, anyway), because we have a tendency to assume men approach virginity loss from the stigma script.

But let’s hone in on the rite of passage script, which, as I noted, is the one I think we’re coming to endorse more frequently, societally speaking.

One of the major arguments I made in The Consummate Virgin is around the idea of the “right” time to have sex. The twentieth century saw a shift away from marriage as the right time to love.

Now, obviously “love” is a lot more nebulous and difficult to define than “marriage”, which has caused many people much angst. The introduction to my book is called ‘The Lost Virginity of Britney Spears’, which is a classic example of this: when Justin Timberlake did Britney dirty and revealed that they’d had premarital sex, the (smart) PR move that she made was to be like “I thought we were in love”, which discursively positioned her virginity loss as, if not moral, then forgivable, with JT as the villain.

This idea of love being the only acceptable reason to lose your virginity is much more heavily policed for women than for men (this assertion is essentially The Consummate Virgin distilled to a sentence), but let’s think about how this narrative plays out for men – and for Wesley in particular.

(NB: I’m not personally endorsing any of these sexual scripts, by the way. A lot of this is deeply harmful! However, they are narrative lenses through which many people view the world, for better or worse.)

If we consider virginity loss as a rite of passage, as a natural next step in a process of attaining maturity, then staying a virgin well into adulthood becomes… weird. There’s a sense that you can wait too long. If we use a super gross metaphor that people frequently use about virginity, a flower that was once blossoming starts to rot.

When you consider that men are typically considered to be subject to a stigma script – ie. they can’t wait to get rid of their virginity! losing your virginity makes you a man! – this becomes redoubled. Waiting to have sex becomes deeply strange – arguably even perverse.

To circle back to the beginning: this is why I think Sean Lowe got to kind of have his cake and eat it too as a born-again virgin. He had fucked – he’d passed through that rite of passage that makes one a man, even if he felt weird about it – and had made the choice to stop.

Wesley has no such luxury – and while the show isn’t pinning it specifically on the virgin thing (yet, anyway), it’s clear that a lot of what he’s bringing to the table is turning the women right off.

That’s a major theme of tonight’s episode, so let’s get into it.

Remember how we had a cliffhanger last night with Wesley slipping Holly a note? Tonight, we hear what it says.

It’s a love note. Wesley is into Holly, and the letter is all like, “I love our chats, I think you’re so great, heart eyes heart eyes heart eyes”.

Holly puts it fairly delicately, but it’s obvious she is repulsed by this. She uses the phrase “love-bomb-y”, which 1) not wrong, but also 2) truly something you would not generally expect to see on a Bachie season, where the Bachie is supposed to be positioned as fundamentally desirable. I remain profoundly unsure about Wesley as a casting choice, but there’s no doubt that this has made interesting television.

…also 3) love-bombing is often discussed in the context of cult tactics, and… well, you can draw your own conclusions from there.

Luke and Tabitha’s date

There are other Bachies on dates, though! Luke takes a blonde named Tabitha, who looks exactly like Ellie. This man has a type.

They go horse-riding. He starts cracking dad jokes a mile a minute like Aldi Honey Badger. She laughs. He likes it.

I feel like if she was going to be a real contender, they would have spent more time on this.

Ben and Mckenna’s date

I’m really intrigued by the way they’re constructing Ben this season. I’ve seen a lot of criticism of him as bad casting because of his inability to talk about his feelings, but I think what we’re getting here is actually a character arc. They’ve given Ben a clear character flaw, so he has something to overcome – which is much better than some of the “here is a cardboard cutout handsome man” thing they’ve done in the past.

(Like I said last time: they’ve done an Anthony Bridgerton on him. This is pure distilled Bridgerton.)

He and Mckenna go to a closed-for-the-day Luna Park. I hate an abandoned theme park date – I find them profoundly creepy, this is horror movie shit – but putting Ben on a roller coaster probably isn’t a terrible idea. Roller coasters can engender misattribution of arousal – the same reaction they’re trying to provoke when they throw people out of planes, where you mistake fear for attraction.

Interestingly, Ben’s like “attraction’s the easy part!” He and Mckenna have a nice time, but afterwards, when they go to the Espy for a drink, comes the real challenge.

Mckenna explains that she often has difficulty opening up because of her past with a mostly-absent dad. And this time Ben – instead of clamming up or starting to sweat, like he did with Caitlin and Ellie last night – finally cracks and admits that he has trouble opening up because an ex did a number on him.

“I’m lonely,” he admits – which I found very interesting, because this is a) a classic romance hero thing broadly, and b) an Anthony Bridgerton thing specifically. If Ben was wearing a different jacket and he said that his ex-partner was actually his opera singer ex-mistress, this would simply be Bridgerton.

Wesley and Holly’s date

Wesley is psyched to be going on a date with Holly.

Holly is straight up panicking.

He’s taken her to a Brazilian samba class (extremely on the nose there from production: even my man Murray O’Connell, whose favourite saying is “subtext is for cowards”, would raise an eyebrow). They get about two steps in before Holly is like UM CAN WE HAVE A CHAT?!

She lets him down as sweetly and politely as she possibly can, telling him that she just doesn’t feel a spark. Wesley is an over-the-top level of gracious about it – like, he thanks her for breaking up with him – which felt a little much, for reasons I’ll explain more in a minute.

The elephant in the room here, IMO, is less the virgin thing and more the fact that Holly is a scientist. They could have set up a classic (wo)man of science, man of faith thing here, and I’m not quite sure why they didn’t.

Group date

Okay, this is why Wesley’s “thank you for dumping me” thing felt so over-the-top it almost turned the corner into sinister for me.

We don’t get any detail on which Bachies have invited which women on this group date (which is a tennis date at Melbourne Olympic Park, where they hold the Australian Open), with one exception.

Wesley invited Holly.

“Oh, that’s so sweet!” Holly says. “He wants to give me the chance to talk to the other Bachies!”

But there’s a flip side to this – which Holly notes, while not diving into what I think is the darker motivation behind it. If you’re on the group date, you’re up for elimination. And Wesley – the Bachie who brought her – is sure as shit not going to give her a rose.

This puts Holly in a position where she has to win over Ben or Luke so profoundly that they give her a rose ahead of women they actually invited on the date. Wesley has essentially set her up to fail.

There are a few little other narrative beats in here. Luke bonds with Lana over their mutual love of cooking. Ben has a nice chat with Amelia. Wesley goes full heart eyes when he chats to a woman named Nella and she mentions the word “faith”.

(He also chats to Brea, who is like BTW I LOVE SEX AND I AM SUPER HORNY ALL THE TIME, which I suspect is foreshadowing for next episode.)

But really, the narrative of this date is about Holly.

Right near the end, she finally gets some time with Ben. They have a pretty nice, albeit not exactly romantic, chat about the environment, before we get into some more personal topics. “I really want to get married and have kids,” quoth Ben. “How about you?”

“Um…” is essentially Holly’s response.

Rose ceremony

It should come as no surprise that the rose ceremony is also dominated by the Holly narrative.

Ben is handing out the last rose. He has to choose between a woman named Maddison and Holly. And he picks…

…Maddison, who seems like she’s going to do some interesting shit-stirring next episode. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

They show Holly hugging Luke and Wesley in farewell, but not Ben (which I assume is meant to be a visual symbol of their lack of compatibility, not concrete proof that they didn’t hug). They make it seem like Holly and Wesley are going to be great pals now – they actively make plans to catch up in Sydney sometime.

But this is sinister, I’m telling you! Wesley set Holly up to fail in that group date – “oh, you don’t love me? well, fine, just try and make these other blokes love you, then!” – and it worked.

It does, though, give us a nice little arc for Holly, which emphasises the narrative of choice they’re running with this season. In her limo exit, she says she regrets nothing – which, we are to assume, includes dumping Wesley and not lying to Ben about their fundamental incompatibility.

If they ever do The Bachelorette/s, Holly certainly wouldn’t be the worst choice in the world.

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this recap – thank you! I assume that means you enjoy my writing, so don’t forget that I’m the author of three reality TV rom-coms. Here For The Right Reasons (Bachelor + the first contestant he eliminates) and Can I Steal You For A Second? (contestant + contestant) are out now; while Not Here To Make Friends (villain + producer) will be out in January and is available for pre-order.

It’s been eight weeks and sixteen episodes (NB: the Bachelors get more episodes than the Bachelorettes, and I am NOT OKAY with that), but finally we’re here. It’s finale time, and we’re going to find out, finally, at long last, who Matty J is going to date for the foreseeable future.

Even though we all knew it was going to be Laura from the first episode. Ahem.

In my recap last night, I wrote a bit about how Australian Bachie differs from other iterations of the franchise, particularly US Bachie, in its structure for the final three (ie in the States, they bang; here, they don’t). But our lack of fantasy suites isn’t the only way we differ here in Oz. We also have a few important differences in the stage we’re at now, where only two contestants are left:

1. Australian Bachie is wholly diegetic: that is, there’s no breaking the fourth wall and exiting the Bachie bubble. In the US, after the fantasy suite dates, there’s an episode called ‘Men Tell All’ (or ‘Women Tell All’, depending on whether it’s The Bachelor or The Bachelorette), where Chris Harrison (their version of Osher) will host a talkshow in which all the contestants bar the final two participate. Old intra-contestant grievances are aired, and contestants have the opportunity to confront the Bachie.

Similarly, after the finale airs and we know who the Bachie has chosen, there’s another talkshow called ‘After the Final Rose’, where the Bachie must be confronted by their runner-up before publicly snuggling with their winner.

We don’t do either of things in Australia. Sure, the Bachie and his winner go on an epic press tour afterwards that mirrors the conditions of some of the public snuggling, but we don’t have any dedicated forums where eliminated contestants can publicly confront the Bachie. (Except for, like, New Idea. And the Daily Mail. And the internet. But none that Osher is moderating.)

2. We have way, way, WAY less of a marital impulse in Australian Bachie. Sure, the Bachie usually talks – as Matty has this season – about finding someone to spend the rest of their life with, but in the US, the show is specifically set up to facilitate a proposal. Like, there’s a creepy jeweller that the Bachelor (or the final two contestants if it’s The Bachelorette, because heaven forbid a lady propose to a dude) must visit to pick out a ring. And if there’s no proposal? That’s a big fucking deal, my friends. That’s an out and out snub.

So far, we have had exactly one proposal in Australian Bachie history, and it was in the relationship that went off the rails the quickest. In season 2 of The Bachelor, Blake ‘dirty street pie’ Garvey proposed to Sam Frost, only to ditch her before the show even finished airing and going on to date Louise Pillidge, who’d placed third, for eighteen months. (And then when Blake and Louise broke up, they did this HILARIOUS photo shoot for New Idea where they stood on a cliff and looked sadly in opposite directions.) When Sam then went on to become the Bachie herself in season 1 of The Bachelorette, she was very clear that there would be no wedding bells at the end of the season: ‘let’s just try boyfriend-girlfriend for a while first, hey?’ she said.

And since then, there has not been even a HINT of nuptials around Australian Bachie. There have been a few rings, but they’ve been ‘commitment’ rings. It’s part and parcel of the same impulse that means we have no fantasy suites here, and contestants are way less likely to confess their undying love for the Bachie. There just aren’t quite the same narrative pressures placed on them in the Australian iteration of the franchise.

So, now we know how the narrative framework we’re in is different to the narrative framework of US Bachie, let’s dive right into it. Who will Matty choose, and how certain is it that it will be Laura?

Let’s do a quick review of our final two contestants.

Laura

Bio: 31 years old, jewellery designer, says she’s from Sydney but is actually from Wollongong (and is pretty much the same age as me, so howwwwwwww did we not cross paths as teenagers), looks a little like Matty’s ex/my TV BFF Georgia Love, has an excellent dog called Buster.

Pros: Matty is clearly super into her, and she’s pretty into him, and they seem like they really get on.

Cons: We’ve all known she was going to win since forever so there’s not a lot of suspense here.

Romantic narrative breakdown: He went looking for love … and she was right under his nose all along: a) in that he totally realised she was winning this by Episode 3 at the very latest, and b) she lives like two minutes from where he does.

What Jodi will do if Laura wins: Be smug and celebrate in her rightness.

Elise

Bio: 28 years old, from somewhere in South Australia, ex-Hockeyroo (which, like, is incredibly boss as far as a career history goes), not a doppelganger of anyone as far as I know, dog ownership status up in the air.

Pros: Matty is completely obsessed with her dad Phil, and has discussed having a ‘connection’ with him.

Cons: She and Matty have no chemistry and she was never, ever going to win this.

Romantic narrative breakdown: She was the girl he didn’t notice … until he did. (After he met her dad.) This directly mirrors the narrative that was constructed around Matty and G Love in The Bachelorette last year, but, I’d contend, this has been done less successfully.

What Jodi will do if Elise wins: Turn in her PhD bonnet, because she does not deserve the title of Dr Love.

We cool? Cool.

The first step on the final two whirligig is Meet The Family. It’s always in a glamorous location (except for 2015, the Budget Bachie year, where Sam Wood declared his love to Snezana Markoski in the driveway of the Bachie mansion), and this year is no different: we’re in Thailand on a tie-in promotion with AirAsia. Bachie NZ also did the AirAsia/Thailand double bill this year (albeit not for the finale), so I wonder if there was, like, some kind of package deal going on here.

But back to the point! Matty has met the families of his multiple girlfriends on hometowns, and it’s time for them to meet his.

(Dr Love hat on, it’s exactly the same dynamics in these dates as in hometowns in terms of what meeting the family means.)

First up is Elise. ‘You’ll love Elise!’ Matty tells his family brightly. ‘She loves the outdoors!’

I’m pretty sure that Matty doesn’t actually know anything about Elise beyond that she likes the outdoors. What an excellent foundation for a relationship.

Matty’s brother Tom takes Elise aside and starts peppering her with questions. The show gives Elise, like, one sentence in reply, and of-fucking-course it is ‘Matty and I both really like the outdoors!’ so I feel like it’s fair to say Elise knows as much about Matty as Matty knows about Elise.

Matty’s mum, though, basically falls in love with Elise on the spot. ‘Our family is very close,’ she says. ‘And sometimes people find that intimidating.’

‘Mine too!’ Elise says. ‘I totally get it!’

…there is some subtext here I’m not getting, I think. Like, are they both in cults? Is this cult talk?

And this cultishness is only compounded when Matty’s mum tells Elise that if it doesn’t work out with Matty, she can have her pick of her other sons. She knows a convert when she sees one.

The cult pitch doesn’t work so well on Laura, though, mostly because they can’t get a word in to make it. Laura, by her own admission, monologues when she’s nervous, and her verbal vomit is at epic levels when she meets Matty’s family. At one point she – GASP – keeps talking when Matty’s brother Tom wants to interject, leading him to growl that she’s ‘not compatible’. ‘With cult values,’ I’m assuming is the undercurrent there.

When Tom takes Laura away, he’s like, ‘I could see how compatible Elise was with Matty right away.’

‘…’ Laura says, speechless at last.

‘I don’t even know if you like the outdoors,’ he growls.

FFS.

Laura reassures them that she does, in fact, like the outdoors, and he perks right back up. And then she wins over Matty’s mum by crying and telling her that she’s fallen in love with Matty, and that she can’t even think about the possibility of not ending up with him.

When Matty sits down with his family to get their opinion, his brothers are split on which lady to pick. ‘I would be happy to have either of those ladies join our family,’ his mother decrees.

Yep. Definitely a cult.

(Imagine if Tara had been on this date. Maybe Matty strategically sent her home, because there’s no way his family – or any family – wouldn’t be on their knees, begging him to marry her.)

And so, with uncertainty in his heart (lol not really it was always going to be Laura), Matty embarks on his very final dates.

Elise is first up. She and Matty are on a yacht in the middle of the ocean, where, as she tells us, it is ‘quite deep’. ‘Just like I’m deep in it!’ she adds.

Back off, Elise. Pointing out the symbolism is my job.

But deep in it she is, because on the yacht, she tells Matty not that she could fall in love with him, not that she’s falling in love with him, but that she loves him, and much pashing assumes.

Then, ‘let’s kayak to this island!’ Matty declares.

Look. If I was on a date, and I’d just confessed my most heartfelt feeling, and the object of my affections was like GUESS WHAT? SURPRISE KAYAK, they would not remain the object of my affections much longer, because I would throw them bodily into the sea.

But then, I guess I don’t ‘love the outdoors’ like Elise does.

They kayak to an island, frolic about on the beach and in the water (missing a golden opportunity to pull a From Here to Eternity), before heading to their final ever Couch of Wine and Intimate Conversation. ‘I’m in love with you,’ Elise tells Matty again, and they pash again, etc etc etc.

I have tried to understand the Matty+Elise thing. I have tried. But there is just nothing there at all that I can see.

…unlike lady #2, Laura, which we’ve all been able to see from basically the very beginning.

Matty and Laura’s date begins in a helicopter (thus sucking up the very last of Channel 10’s money), and then moves to an elephant sanctuary. I’m pretty sure this exact elephant sanctuary was in Bachie NZ, which gave me a lot of questions about how and if the two shows are tied, but I won’t subject you to them.

Because in the finale episode, ladies must be in bikinis and dudes must be shirtless, Laura and Matty get into the water with an elephant and give it a bath. They’re laughing and kissing and the elephant shoots water from its trunk right near Matty’s crotch, which I bet led to some hilarious screenshots, and it would have been really very charming if the elephant handler wasn’t hovering on the edge of frame, uncomfortably watching them pash.

Next, they go on a bamboo raft, and the poor guy poling the raft is in basically the same position. (I have a few things to say about the way this show disappears labour, but this isn’t really the time for this rant.) It starts raining, which means they’re doing the boat scene AND the rain scene from The Notebook all at the same time – clever double up on the romantic imagery there – before they finally make it to their very final Couch of Wine and Intimate Conversation.

‘I love you,’ Laura tells Matty. ‘I don’t want this to be the end. I want it to be the beginning.’

Two things:

1. I ship it.

2. This really highlights the way we think of love in narrative terms. Back in my recap of the first episode I wrote a bit about this, but to distil it: it’s hard to think of love without thinking of a love story.

And then: it is time for … THE CHOICE.

There’s a montage of everyone getting ready, putting on their fancy outfits like armour. Margaret Bradstock argues that one of the biggest changes in the romantic narrative in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was ‘the shift from shining armour to a ball-gown as basic battle-dress’ (1992, 54), and I think we see echoes of that idea here. It’s armour to find love, to win love, to declare love, or – for one lady – to lose love.

Each lady is in her own boat, heading to the island where Matty is. The first lady – the runner up, because one contestant must be let go before the other can win – steps out of the boat. And it is…

Come on, was there ever any doubt? You know who it is.

Elise steps out of the boat in an absolutely FIRE dress. Like, I don’t comment on Bachie fashion a lot, but her dress is incredible, and I hope she gets to keep it and repurpose it and wear it out on a date with a man with whom she has actual chemistry.

She walks down to where Matty is standing on a carpet. (Are they going for an a-whole-new-world thing here? As in, Matty’s new relationship is a whole new world? They also clearly spent all their money on that helicopter if they’ve just plonked him on a cheap rug for his ultimate declaration.) She’s smiling, but Matty looks serious, and her doom is spelled out on his face.

‘You’re so similar to me, and I love that about you,’ he says, apparently unaware that he is basically just talking up how great he is in this dumping speech. ‘You deserve something and someone really special. But it’s not me, Elise. Sorry.’

Elise holds it together spectacularly. She thanks him, tells him she’s glad she met him, and walks away.

She cries a bit in the limo – which, like, is to be expected, I suppose – but I’ve seen more crushed Bachie finalists (exhibit A: Matty J). I think Elise is going to be just fine. Especially if she gets to keep that awesome dress.

And then: the main event. The one we knew was coming since forever. The one which is allowing me to maintain my Dr Love credibility.

‘Laura is the most perfect woman I’ve ever met,’ Matty tells Osher.

And, like, we must remember that Matty has met a) my TV bestie Georgia Love, and b) Tara, so this is SAYING SOMETHING.

He takes his sweet-arse time spitting out his declaration of love, though. He – normally quite eloquent – stumbles and stutters over his words until Laura just tells him to rip the bandaid off, to do it, one way or the other.

He looks her in the eyes. And –

‘Laura, I love you,’ he says. ‘I think you are so perfect.’

She starts laughing and crying all at once. ‘I thought you were going to break my heart,’ she says. ‘I was waiting for you to break my heart.’

And then, of course, there is much kissing, and the camera swirls, and I can tell that they’re intercutting between two different kisses, because Matty is left-headed and Laura is right-headed, and that’s a difficulty they’re going to have to work out, but I’m sure they’ll be able to manage it somehow.

‘Give me your right hand,’ Matty says.

This is the point at which we all wipe our collective brows, because a) we’d seen Matty put a ring box in his jacket pocket earlier, b) Laura, who is normally wearing a thousand rings because she is a jewellery designer, is noticeably ringless, and c) the show has put her in a white gown that is not, shall we say, un-wedding-y.

But Australian Bachie has stayed true to form. This is not a proposal. It’s just a promise ring – a promise that they’ll be together for the foreseeable future.

And so I guess there’s just one last thing to say…

(I wouldn’t bet on it. I have bad, wordy habits.)

This is the episode that stands in for what once would have been hometowns, but Screen Vic is clearly not willing to let the production out of Melbourne. Everyone’s families have flown in, and they’re all meeting each other, in one – well, three – big tumultuous banquets.

…well, not really tumultuous, aside from my favourite scab to pick at Wesley. I feel like they could have tried a wee bit harder here.

This is something I want to think about a little bit more before we get into the recap of events – the idea of norms and how something like The Bachelor reveals them.

The Bachelor is, I think, the most normative of the reality dating shows, because it has the fewest gimmicks. Unlike something like Married at First Sight, where the gimmick is in the name, The Bachelor steps through the milestones of romance in a heightened, fairytale-esque setting – meeting, liking, dating, kissing, committing. Meeting families, which everyone is doing tonight, is one of those milestones.

Because of this, unlike more gimmicky shows, The Bachelor has the capacity to both reveal and shape norms. The Bachelor himself is usually positioned as both an aspirational figure and an everyman, which makes him function as a kind of arbiter of norms. Because his role is to choose his partner, we tend to read the attributes of that partner – or, at least, of the serious contenders – as the attributes one should have to be worthy of love. For example, the show has tried to tell us that Amelia doesn’t have the correct attributes, thus making her elimination feel narratively deserved.

However, in this multi-Bach format, the Bach doesn’t need to function in quite the same way. Because there are three of them, he doesn’t need to be an everyman in the way, say, a Matty J needed to be – which opens up the door for us to consider him as sometimes transgressing, rather than setting, the norms.

With Ben, I think they’re trying to draw from that old everyman playbook. Whether they’re succeeding or not is another matter – the fact he has apparently never heard of the question mark continues to be infuriating – but they are, for lack of a better word, trying to position him as the “normal” one, your standard Bachie.

With Luke and Wesley, I think we’re getting some alternatives. Luke is a good alternative – embodying a really blokey Australian masculinity but with bonus emotional intelligence. Wesley, however, is clearly being positioned as… not a particularly good alternative.

Instead of Wesley functioning as the arbiter of norms, he’s so far outside them – in a way abetted by comparison to the other Bachies – that the architecture of the show has been turned around on him. When the Honey Badger rejected both Britt and Sophie in the finale of his season, the anger of the audience was generated because the implication was that he had somehow found these two women the show had set us up to like as unworthy of love. But when Brea inevitably rejects Wesley…

…let’s just say I don’t think that’s how the audience are going to react.

So I can show you what I mean – let’s get into the recap.

Rather than each Bachie and their family meeting a contestant and their family individually, they’ve smashed everyone together. The idea here is obviously to generate conflict, but much like the weird day spa date the other day, I think it just makes it more awkward than anything else.

That said, this episode is already long enough for how little happens in it, so maybe that’s for the best.

Ben, Mckenna and Angela

Ben and his two brothers meet Mckenna, her mum, and her cousin; and Angela and her best friend.

Truly so little happens in this lunch, even with the awkwardness of everyone having lunch together (which probably has something to do with how incredibly incurious Ben is – my dude, please learn about the question mark!).

The biggest conflict comes when Ben is waxing lyrical (by his standards) about how deep his initial connection with Mckenna was, which obviously does not please Angela terribly much. Angela’s best friend takes him aside to be like, “dude,” to which he’s like, “oh”, and then he goes in and says a bunch of nice stuff about Angela so Mckenna can feel just as awkward.

They really have done their best to turn his lack of communicative ability into a narrative, but this man just has zero conversational intelligence.

Luke, Lana and Ellie

Luke, his mum and his sister meet Lana, her sister and her brother-in-law; and Ellie and her parents.

My favourite thing about all of this is that Lana’s sister’s name is Lina. Some real cartoonish name choices in this family, clearly.

This lunch has a bit more of a narrative to it. I’m not quite sure what the Ellie piece of it is supposed to be – her dad takes Luke aside and says a few things that involve the word “intimacy” that make Luke feel very awkward (what is he actually saying, though? I couldn’t work it out) – but the Lana piece has an arc.

Lana, it turns out, has a history of dating men who drink, and is keen not to do that again, especially given she has a daughter. When her sister and brother-in-law hear that Luke is an ex-NRL player, they’re immediately wary, given the reputation that NRL players have.

When they take Luke aside to discuss this with him, he’s very honest. “When my career ended due to injury I did drink a lot,” he says. “But then I realised things would have to change, or I was going to end up dead. I started seeing a psychologist, and now I’ve got coping mechanisms and a support network that I never had before.”

“If something bad happened again, do you think you’d turn to alcohol again?” Lana’s sister asks.

“No,” Luke said. “I know how to ask for help now.”

This is great! What good narrative! This is the kind of thing they could have leaned on much earlier in the season, to be honest – Luke is very good at narrating his own story, and they definitely could have exploited that more.

Wesley and Brea

I feel like we all saw this trainwreck coming.

Brea, her mum and her sister meet Wesley and his stepmum Baby (the one he Zoomed the other episode and who told him to NEVER COMPROMISE), and it does not go well.

The fact that Brea starts crying before the meeting even starts isn’t a great sign. “I’ve realised that I make all the compromises in our relationship, and he makes none,” she sobs to her mum.

“Brea, you shouldn’t need to compromise,” her mum – very sensibly – says.

This is not the opinion of Baby. To say the least.

This lunch is a lesson in clashing norms, and it really shows how far the needle has swung that we’re now perceiving a contestant as the arbiter of norms rather than the Bachelor. Brea and her family are pushing for something that they – and we, the audience – are encouraged to identify as very normal: she wants to sleep in the same bed as her partner when she goes to stay, even if they’re not having sex. “I think this is a pretty small and reasonable request,” she says timidly.

Baby is not having that. “You’re going to need to compromise on that,” she says. “You need to raise your standards, Brea. You’re not used to being treated with respect, by a gentleman like Wesley.”

Wesley, through all of this, says nothing.

Brea eventually gets so frustrated that she bursts into tears again, and her mum goes to comfort her. “I don’t think I’m asking too much,” she sobs.

“You’re not,” her mum replies through gritted teeth, clearly furious at the suggestion that Wesley being with Brea is him “lowering his standards”.

After the lunch, Brea does her best to lay down a boundary with Wesley. “I’m doing all the compromising,” she says. “I’ve agreed to no sex. You need to meet me halfway.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” Wesley says, somehow managing to be a worse communicator than Ben.

I suspect a lot of people will be cheering tomorrow when Brea inevitably dumps Wesley.

(We also find out that he sleeps in a single bed? And Brea is willing to sleep with him in said bed? RUN, BREA.)

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this recap – thank you! I assume that means you enjoy my writing, so don’t forget that I’m the author of three reality TV rom-coms. Here For The Right Reasons (Bachelor + the first contestant he eliminates) and Can I Steal You For A Second? (contestant + contestant) are out now; while Not Here To Make Friends (villain + producer) will be out in January and is available for pre-order.

I usually ramble up here about some only tangentially related issue for a while before I get into the recap, cooking-blog-style, but what I want to ramble about tonight is connected to the BIG EVENT that occurs, so let’s just flag it right away.

There are two key things I want to flag:

1. Wesley has ditched Nella and Natalie in favour of only spending time with Brea.
2. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I SAID WOULD HAPPEN.

(Okay, fine, I cannot claim to be a future-predicting sorceress when the second half of my prediction – that this will end with Wesley catastrophically dumped – has not yet come true, but check back in on Wednesday for what I am confident will be my victory lap.)

This is obviously a highly unusual thing to occur within a framework like the Bachieverse, but it isn’t quite as unique as the producer talking to Wes would have us believe. He says that this has never happened in any season ever before, but that’s not true: in Season 16 of The Bachelorette in the US, Bachelorette Clare Crawley left with contestant Dale Moss only a few episodes into the season, and they had to parachute in a new Bachelorette – Tayshia Adams – to replace her.

I suppose Wesley’s situation is a tiny bit different, abetted by our multi-Bach structure. He and Brea are still going through all the dates and things associated with the Bachie format – a sort of relationship trial period – rather than him straight up leaving. But still, there is more precedent than this producer would have us believe.

This is what I want to talk about before we get into the episode – not the precedent, but the producer.

I have spent A LOT of time thinking about the role of reality TV producers over the last eighteen months. It was obviously something that I had to think about when writing Murray in Here For The Right Reasons and Can I Steal You For A Second?, where he was the producer yanking the strings of those four romantic leads (Bachie Dylan JM and contestants Cece, Amanda and Dylan G), but when it came time for him to take centre stage with Lily in Not Here To Make Friends, that turned the dial up even more. I have thought about this a lot. However much you’re thinking: it was more.

The popularity of the first season of Unreal really shifted the needle on how a lot of people think about producers in reality TV. We’re now delighted when we see them, I think – we feel that little bit smarter, that little bit more informed, because we have that extra level of knowledge about how reality TV production works (I’m hoping getting a window into Murray’s thought processes in Not Here To Make Friends will do the same thing for readers and increase this fascination!).

I’ve referred many times in these recaps over the years to the scholarship of Misha Kavka. The Bachelor/ette is what she would call a “second generation” reality TV show, which means it intervenes with rather than creates reality. Even though the participants are all real and it’s nominally unscripted, the show takes place against an obviously artificial and engineered backdrop: actual reality is “something that lies ‘before’ the participants, that is, in the participants’ future as a result of the interventions of the reality TV apparatus” (Kavka 2012, 113).

Producers are a clear part of this apparatus – perhaps the clearest part, in fact. When we see a producer, we immediately become aware of just how artificial and engineered the backdrop of the show is. It’s an example of what the famous theorist of theatre Bertolt Brecht called the verfremdungseffekt, sometimes described in English as the alienation or the distancing effect. It interrupts immersion in a narrative and identification with characters: when this effect is employed, we immediately become conscious that the story is a story, that it’s a narrative being constructed (perhaps to play upon our emotions), and it shifts the way we engage with it.

This is why, in Not Here To Make Friends, Murray says, “I didn’t typically like being part of the on-screen narrative. The more audiences saw of how the sausage got made, the more cynical they got about how real the romances were” (223). Most of the time, he doesn’t want to trigger the verfremdungseffekt in the viewer: he wants them to buy into the fact that Bachie Dylan JM and whichever contestant he’s with at a given time could really fall in love.

However, there are times when triggering this effect and drawing attention to the artificial apparatus around the cast can actually be highly productive. Murray deploys it a few times in Not Here To Make Friends (no spoilers as to where, you’ll have to read the book to find out), and we see it deployed to great effect in this episode, when Wes makes his decision.

It is not an accident that this episode begins with a clapperboard before Wesley’s ITM to camera about his decision to focus only on Brea. It is not an accident that we hear the producer asking him questions and talking to him (and making only half-true claims about this never happening on any season before).

What it does is draw attention to the artificiality of the structures in which Wesley is trapped as the Bachelor – forced to step through this ongoing process, even though he knows what he wants. It pits the artificiality of the show and the reality of his love for Brea against each other, making the apparatus of the show an obstacle that he has to overcome. By throwing it away, by stepping outside the neatly defined role of Bachie, this becomes proof that his love is real.

The TL;DR of this is that it triggers verfremdungseffekt as a way of manipulating the audience into believing Wes’s emotions are real. Brecht intended this technique to, among other things, make audiences aware when they were consuming propaganda by interrupting emotional identification and immersion. I’m fairly sure he would consider this a use of his work for evil.

Anyway! Let’s get into the recap.

Like I said, the beginning of this episode is consumed by Wesley’s Big Decision. There’s a lot of flashing forward and flashing back (that’s just a technique to engineer suspense, a micro-version of the “we begin at the end” thing they did in episode one) between his ITM, him telling the other Bachies, and trying to tell the women.

Eventually, he manages it. He tells Brea aside to tell her what he wants, and she happily accepts. He sits Nella and Natalie down and tells them individually and they accept it without much drama, before being packed off into limos in their activewear.

Something I think the show really missed the boat on was establishing a stronger narrative for Nella. On paper, she seems like such a strong match for Wes – they could have done a whole “she’s the one he should want” / “she’s the one he actually wants” narrative with Nella vs Brea, which could have been quite compelling.

CALL ME, BACHIE.

The single dates

This is another one of those single/triple dates – and this time, it’s an overnight. Each Bachie is taking one woman to a nice hotel in Sorrento, for a day of spa treatments, a group dinner, and then… ?????

Luke brings Ellie. Ben brings Amelia. Wesley, of course, brings Brea.

Luke and Ellie

Luke and Ellie are seamless together. They have a very horny shower makeout session after a body scrub, and it’s clear that they are simply so into each other.

There’s a case to be made that each of the Bachies have a moment of realisation in this episode. Wesley’s we’ve already talked about, but there’s one here which might be Luke’s, the moment when (arguably) it crystallises for him that Ellie is the one. It’s a domestic moment in their hotel room before dinner, as she’s getting ready. She’s in the bathroom putting on makeup, and he looks at her, and the way the narrative is put together makes it feel like something shifts.

“You’re really beautiful, Ellie,” he says hoarsely.

“Thank you,” she replies simply.

And then later, she pops one of his pimples. If that isn’t true intimacy, then what is?

Ben and Amelia

Ben and Amelia are significantly less seamless. It seems like a bit of an odd choice to bring her along after all the villain edit shenanigans that have been going on in the last few episodes – and because she’s already had two single dates – but the reason he gives is that he wants to see if she can open up more.

His technique for doing this? Sitting silently in the spa beside her and waiting for her to… talk.

Now, silence can be a powerful tool for making someone talk. It’s one of the key tools in Murray’s arsenal in Not Here To Make Friends – as he says:

“Knowing when to shut up was a crucial producer skill, letting the silence draw out, extend, get uncomfortably long, until the person you were producing cracked and filled it. There, the silence was a question, and the beauty was that it could be unformed, a simple hanging question mark. Stay silent long enough, and the person you were asking would fill in the question in their mind, pinpointing their own hidden vulnerabilities for you.” (43)

But for this to work, you have to at least point them in a direction first. The silence doesn’t land unless you tack it onto the end of a line of questioning.

Ben doesn’t do that. We’re supposed to be on his team here, because he’s our perspective character and we’ve been set up to hate Amelia, but how is she meant to know what he wants her to “open up” about when he simply just sits there?

He’s pleased, later, when she opens up a bit more at dinner. But do you know why she does that? THE OTHER PEOPLE AT THE DINNER TABLE ASK HER QUESTIONS.

I also must note that at one point in this date Ben refers to being “lubed up” with a paste made of salt (salt!! SALT!!!!), which sent me into a full body cringe. Wesley isn’t the only Bachie who would benefit from some gentle sex education, it seems.

Wesley and Brea

This should be the beginning of Wesley and Brea’s happily ever after, right?

It’s not. It’s all foreshadowing of just how extremely dumped Wes is going to be at this.

In my last recap, I talked a lot of about compatibility, and how the show has done some great work this season making this a narrative driver. It is really clear that Wesley and Brea have chemistry and a connection – these are two people who genuinely like each other (something reinforced for us by that contrast between the artificiality of the process and the reality of Wesley’s feelings).

But they might not fundamentally be compatible.

They have a nice time in the spa. They have a nice time at dinner. But when they go back to Wesley’s hotel room afterwards, and it’s just incredibly awkward…

“I thought he’d express his boundaries,” Brea says mournfully. “I thought that physical side would just come naturally.”

If this isn’t a perfect example of what I wrote about the other night – the way that “organic” and “natural” can be toxic stand-ins for “without communicating at all” – I don’t know what is.

The group date

This group date has real Love Island vibes – it’s a pool party, with giant inflatable birds and everyone wearing as few clothes as possible.

Mostly, this date is just a lot of frolicking, but one key thing happens. Remember how I said all three Bachies have a moment of realisation in this episode? It’s time for Ben’s.

Ben knows Mckenna is feeling insecure – and guesses that it’s probably redoubled by the fact he took Amelia on a third date when she’s only been on one – so he takes her into a private hot tub for a chat.

“I took Amelia because I had some issues and questions I needed to work out,” he tells Mckenna (again, he’s shit-talking another contestant, which is bad Bachie behaviour, although they’re not playing it that way, probably because Amelia’s the villain). “I don’t have those questions with you.”

And then they kiss. The music cuts out. All we hear is the sound of their heartbeats, and when the music kicks back in – it’s to tell us that this kiss was revelatory.

Angela has been my winner pick for Ben for a while, but this made me change my mind. Ben is going to point to this moment as the instant he fell in love. Mark my words.

The rose ceremony

Ben still has four women to Luke’s three (and Wes’ one), so obviously he’s the one cutting someone at the rose ceremony.

(Wes and Brea look on, in a room that is apparently called “the parlour”, because we aren’t done with historical romance yet.)

It comes down to Amelia and Maddison, both members of the villain clique. Amelia stays. Maddison goes.

But I think Amelia is a non-option now for Ben now. Surely this is a two-horse race now between Angela and Mckenna – and I think Mckenna has pulled in front.

I also think Luke will pick Ellie, especially with the moment of realisation he has in this episode, but honestly? he has such a nice vibe with Aarthi and Lana that it could realistically be any one of them. I feel a bit bad for Luke that he’s on this three-Bachie format – the other two men definitely needed the assist, but he’s charming and warm and eloquent enough that he probably could have carried a season on his own.

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this recap – thank you! I assume that means you enjoy my writing, so don’t forget that I’m the author of three reality TV rom-coms. Here For The Right Reasons (Bachelor + the first contestant he eliminates) and Can I Steal You For A Second? (contestant + contestant) are out now; while Not Here To Make Friends (villain + producer) will be out in January and is available for pre-order.

As a committed single girl I was pretty interested to read Liz Tuccillo’s How To Be Single and see what little gems of advice she had to help me up my game, so imagine my disappointment when it turns out Tuccillo has left her self-help column style behind and turned her hand to chick lit.

Rather than a set of clear and patronising rules that only thinly disguise the fact my ultimate life goal should actually be ending my single status, I got a novel that was overpopulated with caricatures rather than characters. But I persevered for a whole five chapters before I eventually had to give up.

I really hate to DNF books, but I’m not even sorry about it this time.

How To Be Single follows Julie, an anthropology graduate who finds herself working for a publishing company as the PR girl for some truly bizarre self-help books. She’s disillusioned with her job but not sure what else to do. And then her former work friend Georgia is dumped by her husband, and begs Julie to take her out and show her the ropes of the New York single scene.

After a disastrous night out, including being judged by some random French women in the ER, Julie starts to wonder if maybe other cultures have something to teach American (white, affluent, university educated, New York) women how to be single. So off she trudges to her boss to pitch the single girls’ self-help book. And of course her boss gives her the go-ahead, and sends her off into the Big Wide World.

To give How To Be Single some credit, the fact that Julie and her friends are 35+ years old is pretty rare in my experience. But that’s the only credit I’m giving it. Because it also covers some pretty dodgy ground regarding mental health, cultural appropriation, and racial stereotypes.

For example, Julie’s friend Ruby definitely has some kind of mental illness. Whether it’s bipolar, depression, or something else I wasn’t able to recognise, but the explanation we’re given is that she just doesn’t cope with being dumped. And ok, some people don’t. But this is a woman who completely falls apart, and spends weeks at a time unable to get out of bed following the disappointment of a failed relationship. That’s quite disturbing. Especially when it’s presented as some kind of quirky, funny character trait.

The tipping point for me, though, was when one of Julie’s other friends Serena (who I’m convinced is the same Serena from Gossip Girl), decides to become a Yogi, giving away all her worldly possessions, shaving her head, and committing to a lifetime of meditation. When her new friends, acquired through Julie, come to the ceremony we get the following observations:

As they followed the smattering of people walking down a grassy hill on a little stone path, they saw that they were clearly overdressed. The other guests were wearing flowing shirts and skirts, the men had various displays of facial hair and the women were mostly sporting unshaved legs. There were a few Indian men in orange robes and sandals…

An elderly Indian man in orange robes who seemed to be the head swarmi started reading from a book in Sanskrit. There were two other male swarmis flanking him, an older Italian-looking swarmi and a really hot fortysomething swarmi. Next to him was an extrememly overweight female swarmi. They stood silently as the head Indian swarmi kept reading.

I persevered for a little longer, with some skim reading but then I hit the Australian leg of Julie’s journey and came across this:

Some people can suffer through it; some people can overcome it and move on. Georgia was felled by it. Like an aborigine with a bottle of Wild Turkey, Georgia spiraled out of control.

Let’s put aside the fact the outdated and offensive term ‘aborigine’ was used in place of Aboriginal person, because okay, maybe that’s a little too nuanced to expect from How To Be Single at this point. But really? I’m expected to be okay with the fact that Aboriginal people and alcoholism are SO synonymous that it serves as a simile here? No. So now that it was clear it wasn’t going to get any better I had to stop. I just don’t have time to waste on something that at best is using surface level representations of non-white races and cultures, and at worst is outright perpetuating racism.

Considering the sheer triteness of the book, it’s not at all surprising the film ditches Julie and her faux-anthropological study in favour of her semi-interesting friend Alice (Dakota Johnson). It’s also not surprising that she’s aged-down significantly because Hollywood doesn’t believe in women over the age of 30 who aren’t Meryl Streep. Or witches.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, Alice’s (possibly movie-created) sister Meg (Leslie Mann) is over 30, but I’m not entirely convinced she wasn’t supposed to be a witch?

But yes, the film deviates drastically from the novel to the point of being unrecognisable. When we meet book-Alice she’s a former paralegal, current Full Time Single Girl. After realising that meeting The One is actually incredibly time consuming, she decides to quit her job and spend all her time going on dates, going to singles events, going to literally every party she’s invited to. It’s pretty extreme.

Meanwhile, film-Alice is just about to start her dream job as a paralegal and decides to leave her longterm boyfriend in order to experience single life, and Eat, Pray, Love her way into some form of self-discovery, I guess? But like, New York stylz? Which probably is the same as the regular kind but louder, and with bagels.*

* I have never been to New York or read Eat, Pray, Love so this is pure conjecture.

When she arrives at her new job, Alice meets Robin (Rebel Wilson), a party girl receptionist with an amazing wardrobe and abrasive personality. Johnson and WIlson are wonderful foils to each other, and their chemistry often saves How To Be Single from crossing into saccharine sweetness. And if the rest of the film had been about their developing friendship as they cruised the New York singles scene together I wouldn’t have been mad. But Wilson never seems to land roles that require her to do anything beyond physical comedy and be loudly crass. So in the interest of plot or something, we’re also introduced to an ensemble cast of Other Single People who have various levels of skill at Single-ing.

There’s Lucy (Alison Brie), the ‘neurotic girl’ who’s created some kind of dating app algorithm (because of course she has), and is apparently incapable of seeing when a guy is feeding her a line.

Tom (Anders Holm), the owner of Tom’s Bar (inspired, right?), who is so determinedly commitment-phobic that he’s turned off the water in his apartment to ensure the women he brings home won’t stay any longer than it takes for them to have sex.

And of course Meg, Alice’s older sister/an incredibly successful Ob-Gyn who definitely doesn’t want to have a baby at all, until she holds one and the baby’s magic reacts to her witch magic and makes her want to have a baby. Even if she has to do it on her own.

It’s clear to see that How To Be Single is trying to subvert the romcom genre, and push into some new territory. The problem is that the attempts to critique just make other gaffes even more obvious. Like the fact that Lucy doesn’t appear to have a job or friends. At all. I mean, maybe she sold her dating app algorithm to Apple and is living off the profits now, but otherwise … ? And maybe Alice has literally no friends beyond her sister before she meets Robin because she lost custody of all the rest in the breakup? And maybe Tom isn’t a total fuckboi and I should actually feel invested in his journey? That last one is a pretty big maybe, though.

The other problem is the territory they lead you into is hardly new. It’s also not conclusions you couldn’t have reached about 12 minutes into the film. Also, for a film that basically encourages casual sex, it seriously lacks actual heat. I’m pretty sure the MA 15+ rating is entirely due to the sweary-ness of Rebel Wilson.

I’m going to have to say it’s a yay for the film and nay for the book. Dakota Johnson is developing a pattern of giving charming performances in movie adaptations of terrible books. And while this isn’t the greatest romcom type movie out there, it’s still got a few laughs in it.

As for the book, just don’t even bother. You’ve got better, more enjoyable things to do with your time than to read How To Be Single.

Content advisory: The book will infuriate you or bore you to death. The film will give you wardrobe envy.

Something that added to my December word count was this article I published in The Conversation today. You know how Wesley is the scab I can’t stop picking at? I wrote about male virginity on reality television, with an obvious Wesley lens.

And now I’m going to keep picking at the scab, because I just can’t fucking help myself. Let’s talk about the Three Cs of Love on reality television and how they’re manifesting with our three Bachies – especially (sorry) Wesley.

Regular readers of my recaps will have heard me talk about the three Cs before, but if you’re new here, I theorise that love in the Bachieverse – and many other reality dating shows, which share similar language – has three key components:

Chemistry: often referred to as a “spark”, this is something ineffable to do with attraction. While you can fan a spark – indeed, Wesley used exactly this language about Jade in episode two – you can’t ignite one in a dead fireplace. Either you have it or you don’t.

Connection: this is simultaneously both more intellectual and more emotional, and can exist on different levels (you will sometimes hear Bachies discussing how they have an emotional but maybe not a sexual connection with someone, for instance). Unlike chemistry, you can develop this over time, as you establish greater intimacy with a partner.

Compatibility: this is the least sexy part of a Bachie love story, because it’s the most concrete and practical. You know how sometimes they get to hometowns and they haven’t discussed very simple, basic things like “where are we going to live?” and it suddenly becomes a huge problem? It’s because the show has prioritised chemistry and connection over compatibility.

Something the show has done this year, though, is really think about compatibility. Unlike the vast majority of previous seasons, they’ve made this a key part of their romantic storytelling.

This is obviously especially true with Wesley, because he has such obvious and clear points of difference with many of the contestants.

• Holly broke up with him allegedly because she didn’t feel a spark (a chemistry problem), but I think we all saw her face change as that oh no, he might be a creationist thought hit her scientist brain in episode two.
• Jade breaking up with Wesley last night was an even clearer example of this – there was no possibility of compromise (another C!) between his firm “I won’t live with someone before marriage” stance and her “I must live with someone before marriage” position.
• Then there’s the ongoing narrative with Brea. They tried to highlight their compatibility last night, but there’s the ongoing “she loves sex / he doesn’t have it” sword of Damocles hanging over their head…

However, the show hasn’t only done this with Wesley. They haven’t really done it with Luke – he’s been so charmingly talkative they haven’t really needed to do much with him yet, to be honest – but we’ve seen it with Ben a few times.

• Ben wants kids, and he’s not willing to compromise on that. This is why he broke up with Holly, and it’s also one of his key points of overlap with Angela.
• Ben has some capital-T Thoughts about how to handle conflict, and when Amelia behaved the way she did around FlowerGate, it put him right off.

Usually, the show shies away from compatibility in favour of chemistry and connection, but I think it’s such a mistake to do that. It leads us to places we were commonly in Locky and Jimmy’s seasons, where the Bach would essentially just be asking contestants “how do you feel about me now? how about now?” in a way that felt very disciplinary.

The heart of any romance narrative is another C – conflict. You can’t tell a love story without giving the lovers an obstacle to overcome.* And it’s in the practicalities of romance, often – the unsexy business of compatibility – that the best obstacles, and thus the best possibilities for narrative generation, lie.

* “We’ve got to have obstacles to overcome if we want the audience to be invested in the love story.” – producer Murray O’Connell to Bachie Dylan Jayasinghe Mellor, Not Here To Make Friends, p. 61.

Recap time!

Okay, before we get to the single dates in this episode, we need to hit two quick points.

1. Wesley is considering “compromising” (his words) some of his deeply held conservative values in the pursuit of romance, after being shaken by Jade’s departure. He calls his stepmother, who’s like, “never compromise! the right partner for you will love you just the way you are!”. This isn’t terrible advice in the broader scheme of things, but it further solidifies the potential for Wesley to end this series just catastrophically dumped.
2. Mckenna is feeling very upset by the fact that Amelia was going around saying that she basically got a pity rose last episode – ie. that if Jade hadn’t self-eliminated, Ben would have cut Mckenna.

Ben and Angela’s single date

There are two things I don’t like about this date:

1. TRANSPORTATION IS NOT A DATE. Granted, this is a boat, and there is a provision in my policy on this matter for boats, but it is a small boat, which they do not leave, or, like, even park. (Do you park boats? As the creator of Olympic-gold-medal-winning sailor Bachie Dylan Jayasinghe Mellor, I feel like I should be slightly more boat-literate.)
2. They are drinking Calabria Bevi prosecco. Calabria has vineyards in NSW and SA but not state-of-filming Victoria – but Victoria is where most of Australia’s best prosecco grapes (glera) are grown (notably, in Prosecco Road in the King Valley)! They should be drinking Pizzini or Dal Zotto, not Calabria… especially considering Bevi retails at about $15, you cheap bastards.*

These things aside, this is a really lovely date. I don’t have that much to say about it, honestly, except that I genuinely believe Ben and Angela together as a couple. Ben is a hard person to warm to, given how conversationally-challenged he is, but it always seems to flow when he’s with Angela. They seem comfortable together – and if that isn’t another major C word when it comes to romance, I don’t know what is.

* “Jeff’s favourite hobby, when we watched the episodes, was trying to ID the alcohol.” Not Here To Make Friends, p. 317.

(Who is Jeff, beyond someone with one of the same annoying habits as me? You’ll have to read the book to find out.)

Luke and Aarthi’s date

This is kind of another Pretty Woman date? Except they don’t call it that this time – they frame it simply as “Luke likes Aarthi so much he’s willing to undergo every man’s worst fucking nightmare – going shopping”.

This entire date takes place in noted romantic location David Jones. Luke tells Aarthi to try on a bunch of dresses, and to pick one. She does. She looks pretty. It’s not much more complicated than that.

They do have an interesting little conversation afterwards, where Luke is like, “so your family don’t want you to be here – if you brought me home, what would they think?”, which has some good stakes. However, considering Aarthi’s answer is “they’d probably like you” it gets undercut pretty fast.

This makes this sound like it was bad television, but it wasn’t. I am so surprised by how much I’m enjoying Luke as a Bachelor. He has such a good vibe with all three of his remaining contestants, but I think his vibe with Aarthi is my favourite – she explicitly says she likes the only thing that most of the viewership have found to dislike in him, ie. his love of calling everyone “darl”.

Also, I must note that Luke and Aarthi are drinking Moët on this date – a much more acceptable Bachie Bevvy than a prosecco you can buy as a canned mixed drink spritz.

Wesley and Natalie’s date

Natalie is a person I genuinely only realised was on the show yesterday, but here she is, one of Wesley’s final three women, off on a single date with him.

They go ice-skating, which is a great date idea – especially considering they’re both garbage at it. This loosely fits under the bracket of the commitment date, which I discussed (via my man Murray O’Connell) yesterday. Give two people a task that’s either ridiculous or will make them look ridiculous, their capacity to commit to it will symbolically mirror their capacity to commit to each other.

Wesley and Natalie commit to the ice-skating. But that’s not the problem.

Production have done a really good job suggesting that there’s not really a connection between Wesley and Natalie without coming out and saying it. Because they’re both novice ice-skaters, they both fall over – and notably, trip each other – a lot. It’s a visual signal of a lack of connection and a lack of compatibility, which very firmly places Natalie as Option #3 in Wes’s three options (Brea is obviously light years ahead, but at least Nella is also into Jesus).

Ominously, at the end of the date, Wesley says that he doesn’t want to lead Natalie on, but he does want to reward how hard she tried that day.

Romance.

The… cocktail party?

I’m not entirely sure what this post-single-dates event is, but it functions like a cocktail party.

The Bachies – who have given their respective dates roses – accompany Angela, Aarthi and Natalie home. Wesley immediately makes a beeline for Brea, and it becomes even more clear that she is the only one he’s remotely interested in (which I’m one million percent sure is foreshadowing for the next episode, given the teaser at the end of this one).

The real action, though, comes from Ben’s group of contestants.

Remember how Mckenna is pissed at Amelia for suggesting that she got a pity rose last night? She pulls her aside during this cocktail party, bringing Angela and Evie (another person who has definitely been here the whole time and did not sneak in the back) along as backup. “You saying that I only got a pity rose really upset me,” she says.

“I never said that,” Amelia replies, despite the fact that she is on camera, saying this.

Amelia is getting a heavy villain edit now, so I don’t want to go too hard on her, especially given the fact that a lot of her dialogue is extremely obviously Frankenbitten (and, like, not well? have they got a new, less good audio person, or am I simply too reality TV literate now? it’s so clear to me). But she is definitely on camera, saying this thing, so lying about it is a sure way to put yourself on a villain track.

Though on the subject of extremely obvious editing: my goodness, the thing that happens next nearly made me cry with laughter.

So, Ben is eavesdropping, and he overhears some of this kerfuffle (which goes on for a while – FlowerGate is raised, it’s a whole thing). Clearly, he walked into the room near the end of the conversation, which probably promptly caused it to end.

But they’ve edited it together to make it look like he entered the room mid conversation, and he’s just standing there silently listening to the airing of all these grievances, while the women have no reaction at all to his entrance.

You know how they fucked up the emotional logic in that Luke/Ben/Ellie love triangle edit in the hot springs episode? This is even worse. Murray O’Connell would be livid if someone he trained connected the dots this badly.

Anyway, Ben takes Mckenna aside afterwards. “I’m really sorry Amelia made you feel like you got a pity rose,” he tells her. “You didn’t. I really like you. The deepest conversation I’ve ever had is with you.”

While shit-talking – however passive-aggressively – one of your contestants isn’t what I would think of as great Bachelor behaviour, Ben comes off well here. This is classic historical romance hero shit again: recognising the worth of someone who’s become a bit of a wallflower, and simultaneously the shallowness of someone in the foreground. In Bridgerton terms, Amelia has become the Cressida Cowper.

A brief interlude

Sorry, before we leave this cocktail party, I simply must talk about wine again. This episode has so many wine crimes in it that I cannot leave unaddressed.

Some of the women are drinking sparkling from coupes. This, I don’t have a problem with. Sure, it’s a surefire way to ensure it’ll go flat in about five minutes (do you want your sparkling wine to stay sparkling? use a flute! you want as little surface area exposed to air as possible!), but there is a long-standing tradition of drinking sparkling wine this way.

What I absolutely cannot tolerate, though, is drinking RED WINE from a coupe. No no no no!

Even the regular wine glasses they have provided are terrible. When you’re drinking still wines, you want a larger bowl that narrows in towards the top – both exposing surface area of the wine to air and trapping aroma in the glass. These are not good wine glasses! They will make your wine taste worse! Glassware matters!

The group date

I thought the cocktail party would take the place of a group date, but no – that was some other, different, wine-crime-y event.

All of the remaining women have been invited on this group date. The promo said it was a hot yoga date, but it seems to be more of a day spa situation, with some light cultural appropriation of South Asian culture by white ladies laid over the top.

This date really makes clear just how many contestants Ben has left compared to the other two Bachies – they have three apiece, he has six. His portion of the date must have taken so much longer to film!

This is, essentially, an intimacy date. Each Bachie and his contestants go through a series of “workshops” (what is this, Too Hot To Handle?), designed to establish intimacy. We’ve got:

1. Women running their hands over blindfolded Bachies
2. Bachies + contestants staring into each other’s eyes
3. Massages

There is a world where this could have been a super sexy, super revealing group date (and been verrrrrrry interesting for our poor virgin Wesley). However, they made a critical error when putting it together, which is that each interaction takes place with the other contestants in the room – eg. when Lana’s rubbing her hands all over Luke, Ellie and Aarthi are there watching.

I’m assuming they did this to provoke conflict, but all it did was provoke awkwardness and prevent disclosure. They would have been much better off sequestering each Bachie and contestant away: not only would this have genuinely built intimacy, but the things the women would have imagined about what happened between their Bachie and the other contestants probably would have been way worse than what they witnessed.

(As his creator, I can tell you that this is for sure what Murray O’Connell would have done.)

As a result, there’s no especially good drama on this date. The only things that really happen are:

• Ben has a revelation about just how extremely into Mckenna he is.
• Ben’s six remaining women give him a massage at the same time, and I hate it very passionately.
• Definitely-here-the-whole-time Evie, another one of his contestants, is like, “well, there’s really no point me hanging around, I can see the writing on the wall”, and leaves.

The rose ceremony

It’s obvious that one of Ben’s contestants will be leaving tonight. Even with Evie self-eliminating, he still has five to the other Bachies’ three.

His first rose goes to Mckenna, who’s now being positioned as the main contender to Angela for Ben’s heart. He also gives a rose to Maddison, which leaves him choosing between villain Amelia and terrible-first-date Caitlin.

He ultimately gives the rose to Amelia, so look for her villain edit to continue next episode, but we simply must salute how far Caitlin has come. To make it to episode eight after a date that disastrous in episode two, which revealed that she and Ben have absolutely nothing going on between them… a remarkable achievement.

The promo

Okay, I don’t normally talk too much about the promo for next time, but this one is intriguing. Wesley is apparently going to sit down with his contestants, and with the other Bachies, and announce that he’s doing something never done before in Bachelor history.

Here is my prediction, based on the foundation they laid in this episode – Wesley is going to cut both Nella and Natalie, leaving Brea as his only remaining contestant. However, he’s not going to then leave the show (something which does have precedent – Clare Crawley did this in the US Bachelorette, where she ran off with her chosen man Dale Moss very early and the show had to parachute in Tayshia Adams as a replacement Bachie).

Instead, he’ll seek to step through the rest of the process with Brea as his only option, as a sort of test as to whether their relationship will work in the real world. This will be an extended – and, I hope, fascinating – narrative about compatibility.

Then she’ll dump him in the finale and he’ll end up crying on Luke’s shoulder.

If I’m right about this, and there’s another season of this show, and they still don’t fucking call me to consult… I swear to god.

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this recap – thank you! I assume that means you enjoy my writing, so don’t forget that I’m the author of three reality TV rom-coms. Here For The Right Reasons (Bachelor + the first contestant he eliminates) and Can I Steal You For A Second? (contestant + contestant) are out now; while Not Here To Make Friends (villain + producer) will be out in January and is available for pre-order.

(For five minutes. Not Here To Make Friends comes on January 3. This is me shamelessly begging you to pre-order it – if you like these recaps, you’ll probably like my books, and pre-orders really do make a difference!)

Before we get into the recap tonight, I want to talk about the idea of intimacy. This is directly relevant to my favourite scab to pick at, Wesley, but it’s a theme in this whole episode tonight, because our various couples are getting therapised.

I’ve written many times before in these recaps about cultural studies scholar David Shumway and his theorisation of passion vs intimacy, but guess what, we’re doing it again.

Broadly speaking, the former (which he calls “romance” but I find “passion” a more useful term for) “offers adventure, intense emotion, and the possibility of finding a perfect mate.” The latter, by contrast, “promises deep communication, friendship, and sharing that will last beyond the passion of new love” (Shumway 2003, 27).

Passionate love, in this formulation, is something that happens to you. It’s beyond your control. Your eyes might meet across a crowded room – and boom, perfect match, without you ever needing to lift a finger. (Is this tied to the seductive-but-not-constructive ideas of the “natural” and the “organic” that I wrote about the other night? Absolutely it is!)

Intimate love, by contrast, is something that you work on – something that happens between people, rather than to them. Intimacy might feel like magic sometimes, but it isn’t: it’s the product of time and work and disclosure between the partners. As Shumway puts it, intimacy is “partly a function of who they [the lovers] are as individuals, [but] it is also a function of how they behave in the relationship” (2003, 25).

Ideas of intimacy became extremely prevalent in the twentieth century. There are a lot of reasons behind this – the rise of psychoanalysis and the therapeutic is one, which is obviously directly relevant to the episode we have at hand – but one of them is narrative. As Shumway notes, passion “may give an account of an extended courtship ending in a marriage made in heaven, but it cannot tell the story of a marriage” (2003, 21). If we want to see what a relationship looks like beyond the getting together, we need to think about ideas of intimacy.

And here we circle back to my favourite scab to pick at, because his decision to ditch everyone and focus only on Brea is allowing the show to do just that – a narrative manoeuvre I find fascinating.

With most Bachies, watching them do what Wes and Brea are doing – step through the Bachie process even though she’s already won – would be pretty dull. It would be the honeymoon stage, the beginnings of (as Brea puts it in this episode, invoking an interesting narrative term) their happily-ever-after (HEA). We would be in what An Goris terms the “post-HEA” (2013) – a space that romance narratives have often had trouble depicting, because conflict is necessary for narrative but simultaneously you don’t want to disrupt a couple’s romantic happiness and thus undermine the promise of the HEA in the first place.

However! Wes and Brea might be together, but they have problems! We have moved beyond the space of passion to the space of intimacy, because this relationship is going to require intimate work if it is going to function – to put them in a space where we can actually believe they have a HEA!

There are two ways this can go:

1. The show convinces us that they love each other enough to do this work, and they reach a point in the finale where we believe yes, they’re going to be OK.
2. This all falls apart and this is alllllllll foreshadowing and Wesley ends up weeping in Luke’s arms.

I believe I have made my position on which one of these I think is more likely very clear.

Anyway! I will make it even clearer as we go on! Let’s get into the recap!

The therapy group date

There are no single dates in this episode. What we go on is technically a group date, but we deal with discrete couples on it – Wes and Brea, and then the three potential couplings Ben and Luke respectively still have in play.

This is a therapy date. I am not entirely sure whether the person they’re talking to is an actual therapist – her job title is “executive matchmaker”, and a quick perusal of the website and its deeply classist language seems to suggest this means she makes matches for executives – but she performs that sort of therapeutic function for our seven potential couples: a neutral third party who can see the obstacles in the couples’ path with clear and unclouded eyes.

IMO, this is a great idea for a date – and a significantly better execution of it than in the last season, where it mostly seemed to revolve around the exhausting polyamory narrative, Thomas being reproductively creepy, and Alésia not wanting to get engaged to a man she’d known for five minutes and what an OMG HUGE PROBLEM that was.

(Oh my goodness, can you imagine if they’d kept the horrifying looming promise of the engagement rings in this season and Brea had that hanging over her head?! Jesus fucking Christ.)

The reason I think that this is a great idea for a date is that you simply cannot have a romance narrative without conflict. This is fundamental to romantic storytelling, what Pamela Regis describes as the “barrier” between the lovers in her eight essential elements of the romance (2003). A couple needs to earn their HEA by overcoming an obstacle, and the question of how they’re going to overcome it is what drives the narrative forward.

This is the reason, by the way, why we see so few romance narratives about people who meet on dating apps. If you meet on an app, the assumption is that you’re both looking for and are ready for love. It’s incredibly difficult to generate conflict from that premise.

So: this is a great idea for a date! It’s all about identifying obstacles!

I’m not sure the execution is all the way there, though. It’s not terrible, but I feel like they could have gone a bit harder here.

Luke

Luke does his level best in his chat with Aarthi and the matchmaker to generate an interesting obstacle when he raises the spectre of her disapproving family, but Aarthi is like, “yes, they don’t approve of me being on the show, but they’d love you” and undercuts that right away.

His chats with Ellie and Lana are similarly non-eventful – Luke has simply, it seems, chosen extremely well when it comes to his final three.

Ben

There’s a bit more juice in Ben’s potential matches, obstacle-wise. We don’t see much of the chats with Mckenna and Angela, but the matchmaker is frank when it comes to Amelia. “What you’re looking for – it’s not her,” she says.

This is meant to reflect poorly on Amelia, per the edit, but much as I’ve been surprised in how much I’ve come to like Luke, I’m equally surprised by just how powerfully I’ve come to dislike Ben. His requirements for a partner are, “can hustle, can chill, can party,” which the matchmaker distils as “the ultimate plus-one” – and my friends, if anyone ever dared suggest my role in a relationship was “plus-one”, I would burn the world to the ground.

(Ben also talks about his “unspoken connection” with Amelia a lot in this section, and… my dude, just say you’re hot for her and drop the pretence.)

Wes

I am not the only person who can see just how catastrophically Wesley is going to get dumped at the end of this.

I assume that Wesley and Brea presented several of their issues to the matchmaker, but the one they zero in on is the living and spending time together situation. The expectation is apparently that Brea will always fly to see Wesley (not the other way around) and that she’ll stay in an AirBnB (because of sex reasons, but also because he has a flatmate? and no one has ever crashed on the couch in a house with a flatmate before?).

The matchmaker asks to talk to Brea alone. “One of you is doing all the compromising,” she tells her bluntly, “and one of you is entirely inflexible, and I think you know which way around this is”.

This season has had its flaws, but one thing it’s done a good job at – unlike, say, in the Honey Badger’s season – is actively making me hope for a couple to break up. Wesley is not doing the work of intimacy with Brea, and what it’s telling us as an audience (or me, anyway) is that these two people not being together might be the happiest possible ending.

If Wesley and Brea do miraculously end up together, I don’t think they can make that feel like a HEA at this stage. #FreeBrea will be trending on any social media platform still around for it to trend on.

The cocktail party

This cocktail party is an odd little affair. There are bits and pieces in here I’m not entirely sure what to do with (although I will, of course, venture my opinion).

The bit I found most bemusing was Ellie sitting Luke down, and saying, “look, I never want to talk shit about the other women, but Aarthi has been going around saying she just wants to get to the end”. She never utters the magic words – not here for the right reasons – but the implication is clear.

I don’t know quite what to do with this, because we have seen literally zero things to suggest that Aarthi has been doing this (she doesn’t deny it when Luke confronts her about it, but it sounds like she’s just been making fairly innocent low-stakes jokes with the other women). With all the girl chats they’ve filmed, they didn’t have anything on camera that could support this narrative?

There’s also curiously little reaction to the fact that Ellie did a spot of snitching here – something which is generally not considered winner behaviour. I depict this in Not Here To Make Friends, where Murray spends a great deal of time frustrated that his frontrunner Dylan G keeps tampering with the “classic, pristine, rising-above-the-drama winner edit” (154) he wants to give her by getting in fights with villain Lily Fireball.

The lack of reaction actually kind of makes me think Ellie will win (well, reinforces my conviction, I already thought that)? Otherwise, surely they’d use this as an opportunity to make Lana look great and Ellie look worse so we were pulling for the “right” team come the finale? And maybe we would have spent more time with Luke and Ellie in the matchmaker date so it was clear that they weren’t perfect for each other?

Overall, though, it was a strange piece of television that really seemed to be missing some narrative scaffolding. Murray O’Connell would be having some stern words with people for not flowcharting it out properly.

The other piece of this cocktail party is a bit more successful, though (although I must note that Amelia’s dialogue in this section is frankenbitten to absolute shit. This feels like a classic example of how a villain edit can be manufactured out of extremely little).

The narrative, as we’re told it, is that Amelia is incredibly confident that she’ll get a rose. She’s positive that she and Angela will be the final two for Ben. This is something we do actually have narrative scaffolding for, because it arose out of that rose maths drama a few episodes ago: the seed that Amelia believes she is way ahead of Mckenna in the fight for Ben’s heart has long since been planted.

But! We, the audience, know that Ben has been having Big Mckenna Feelings lately, full of profound moments! The language of exceptionality has been used a lot of times about her – eg. he had the deepest conversation he’s ever had in his life with her.

So he takes Mckenna outside. “The reason I haven’t spent as much time with you is because I had questions for the other women,” he says. “I have no questions about you.”

(NB: show me proof that Ben knows what a “question” is. His whole communication problem this season seems deeply rooted in the fact that he has never discovered the question mark.)

And then, ahead of the rose ceremony, Ben gives Mckenna a rose – another way in which she is being marked as exceptional – which means that one of Amelia and Angela will be going home.

The rose ceremony

Ben and Luke each have to cut a woman tonight, bringing them down to a final two each (while Wes and his final one Brea look on).

The cocktail party clearly sets up the way this will go – reasonably elegantly in the case of Ben, and deeply inelegantly in the case of Luke. Luke picks Lana and Ellie and cuts Aarthi; while Ben, having already picked Mckenna, picks Angela.

Actually, no. The way this is played is not that he picks Angela – but that he doesn’t pick Amelia. The camera is on Amelia’s face the whole time, and we get her heartbeat in the sound mix as she realises she’s lost.

Just like the lack of drama around Ellie snitching has reinforced my conviction that Luke will pick her; this has reinforced my conviction that Ben will pick Mckenna. If you really want us to be on board the Ben and Angela train, you’d probably put a bit more effort into this rather than positioning Angela as simply Not Amelia.

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this recap – thank you! I assume that means you enjoy my writing, so don’t forget that I’m the author of three reality TV rom-coms. Here For The Right Reasons (Bachelor + the first contestant he eliminates) and Can I Steal You For A Second? (contestant + contestant) are out now; while Not Here To Make Friends (villain + producer) will be out in January and is available for pre-order