Loveboat –> Titanic

As I’ve eluded to several times to my readers, one of my guilty, embarrassing pleasures is my obsession with the reality show train-wreck that is “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette”.

"Vienna, will you marry me?"

Tonight, “The Bachelorette” had a special treat – they brought on last season’s couple, Jake “Cheesewhiz has more personality than me” Pavelka and Vienna “If a horse mated with an alien, it would be me” Girardi. Of course for all of us who have no life, you would know that Jake and Vienna have broken up and each side is accusing the other of typical dumb shit. So the show had them airing out each other’s dirty laundry.
For me however as I watched this car crash unfold before my very eyes, I had only one thought in my head:

About fucking time.

"I'm sure the qualities you've shown in one month is realistic of who you really are"

You see, what happened with Jake and Vienna is very similar to what happens with couples I see all the time. Namely:

1) Under the wrong conditions – One thing I’ve always held reservations about in “The Bachelor” series is the fact that the lifestyle the guy lives is not reflective of his real life. In other words – all that time Jake whisked women away to the Castle in Europe or that exotic Caribbean island…it was on the studio’s coin. So, imagine the shock Vienna felt when she was forced to move into an apartment in California after the show and the closest thing she can get to Malibu is Malibu rum, located neatly behind the cabinet beside the hand-stitched “Bless this Mess” sign, right above the stack of old newspapers and grocery fliers.

Welcome to my home. Make sure you don't scratch the Renoir.

You see, this show really fucks with a girl’s head because for that moment in time, they took away one criterion girls scrutinize heavily when making a decision as to whether or not to spend their life with one man: his ability to make money and give her a comfortable life.
A guy’s earning potential is the elephant in every girl’s room: girls never say it’s that important in a relationship but you must be either 19 or naive as fuck to believe it doesn’t matter.
There was one point in the interview when they asked Vienna what happened between her and Jake after the show and she said “It all went downhill after one month. How can things change so much after one month?” – Um, I can answer that: reality kicked in.
Guess what: you didn’t marry a millionaire. Should have gone on Millionaire Matchmaker instead.

Watching these millionaires lose the girl makes me happy...for five minutes until I realize that they're still millionaires and can buy classy call girls. Then I'm sad again.

2) Power – One of the things that I really noticed during the interview was how much Vienna changed from the doting, playfully mischievous girl to the girl that’s constantly verbally castrating Jake’s manhood on national tv. That’s when I realized that during the show, she had no power – Jake did all the choosing and she was competing with other girls therefore she had to defer all her power to Jake. Once the show was over however the power balance became 50/50 – of course, this isn’t a good thing for Jake whom I’ve long suspected is a crash test dummy painted in human color. You can tell that he got owned in the relationship.

A long time ago, I took martial arts and one of my elders told me something: a can will always be a can. You can paint the can, put bowties on the can or even put it in a box, but at the end of the day, it’s still a fucking can. That’s why relationships break all the time: you can try and be someone you’re not for a few months (even years) but at the end of the day, you are who you are – a can. If the girl doesn’t like cans, then you’re getting recycled.
Jake was aluminum.

3) 10 Miles away – This interview actually ties in perfectly with something I’ve been thinking of recently: knowing right away if someone’s right or wrong for you. From the start, all the girls hated Vienna and warned Jake repeatedly to stay away from her but of course he goes on to choose her. I’m a big believer in gut instincts – as in I usually know right away if I’ll get along with someone or not. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about: sometimes you meet someone that you just don’t trust for some weird reason. It’s not that he said or did anything wrong, you just don’t have a good feeling about him (especially if he’s wearing a striped black and white shirt while holding a bag with a giant money symbol on it).

It’s funny, I was talking to my friends a few weeks ago and we started talking about marriage. Seeing how we’re all hitting 30 soon, marriage talk always creep in. My friend observed that there are two types of girls in a guy’s life: the ones he’s not serious about and the ones that are marriage material. He believes that you know right away if you’re going to be serious about a girl or not. Thinking back, I can’t help but agree – I meet a girl, I know if she’s not good for me and I act accordingly.
I guess how you act depends on where you are in your life – for those looking to get married, they don’t care much for people that waste their time (i.e. If I’m not going to marry you, why am I talking to you?) but for people like me, you don’t mind taking the scenic route since you’re in no hurry to get to wherever the hell it is you’re going.

The other funny thing is that as you get older, guys tend to have a shared number of traits they look for in a girl: well educated, ambitious, not a party girl, etc…I think Chris Rock says it best: whenever you see a wet t-shirt contest,  you feel sorry for the guy who’s going to have to pick a wife from the bunch. Then again, as I’ve said in my book – birds of a feather flock together. I wasn’t surprised when Pornstar Tera Patrick married Rocker Evan Seinfeld. I’d be more surprised if she married an engineer or a guy from silicone valley. It’s where you are in life – really.

Going back to “The Bachelor”, I think Jake chose Vienna because he hoped that choosing the “bad girl” would let him live out the life he never had but always coveted: “The Badboy” then reality set in and he found out the hard way that as much as we’d like to live in television sets, you’re only as good as you are interesting to other people…the viewers and the other people on the show.

Reality TV – they couldn’t have picked a better name for the genre.

Body language basics 101: their eyes are looking away from each other and their smiles are not genuine due to the absence of "The Crow's feet" along their eyes. CHARLATANS!