Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  One of the most common refrains I hear from fans of the show is: “Why do they say ‘I love you’ so quickly?” As the seasons have progressed, it seems the race to drop the L-bomb has only intensified. You’ve got contestants saying they’re falling in love with the Bachelor in week three, when they’ve spent no more than a few days with their newfound soul mate.

  A lot of that, I think, has to do with the bubble effect. But getting cast to utter those magical three words is also a huge goal for producers. Not only is it a clear indicator of who is “here for the right reasons,” but the phrase is promotable. Advertisements can tout that someone said “I love you,” leaving viewers to guess who or make fun of the person who said it so soon.

  About midway through her journey with Juan Pablo Galavis, producers started pushing Clare Crawley to tell him she loved him. At the time, she hadn’t said “I love you” to anyone in ten years.

  “The producers were like, ‘You have to say it, you have to say it. You might go home.’ They would very much encourage it,” she said. “It was like, ‘Are you going to regret not saying it? This could be the last moment you have with him. Don’t you want him to know how you feel? What if this determines if you go home or not?’”

  Crawley said she came to a “happy medium” with the team, agreeing to tell Galavis that she was falling for him, but never saying “I love you.”

  Brooks Forester—who eventually left Desiree Siegfried’s season because he wasn’t in love with her—had a similar experience. In the days before he quit the show, he said, nearly all of his ITMs were centered around getting him to say he loved her, and producers were quick to remind him that he was the only one of the three remaining men who hadn’t uttered the words.

  Still, he refused to give in.

  “For me, it was less about saying it on television and more about saying it to Des,” he said. “If Des really felt that way about me, and I were to communicate that back to her, how shitty would it be to do that to a person if I didn’t actually have those feelings and was just saying it for the show? And I played that scenario out in my head, which is one that probably happened to a lot of people. You’d just be like, ‘Fuck it! Yeah, I love her!’”

  Producers use a similar tactic when it comes to proposing. Almost every contestant I spoke with who made it to the finals said they felt they had no choice but to get engaged at the end—even though there have been a scant few (Galavis, Schefft, Womack, and Palmer) who dared to defy such pressure.

  Even those who do get down on one knee, though, are typically racked with anxiety. The night before he proposed to Catherine Giudici, Sean Lowe started getting cold feet. Part of him felt he was absolutely in love with her—that he couldn’t imagine a life without her. But he also felt like things were too good to be true. He was on a television show, after all—and how well did he really know this woman?

  In the midst of a freak-out, Lowe was sent to talk to executive producer Martin Hilton. The EP assured him he didn’t have to propose to anyone, saying he could always go the Womack route if he so chose. But Hilton also reminded Lowe that this was his only opportunity to give Giudici “the proposal few people on Earth get to have.”

  Still, the Bachelor was unsure of what to do and begged Hilton for fifteen minutes alone with Giudici. It was late, sometime around midnight, and she was in her hotel room, attempting to brush off her own nerves just hours before a potentially life-changing day. She’d just gotten out of the shower, had no makeup on, and had whitening strips on her teeth when Lowe came knocking.

  “He just kind of walked in and talked at me for twenty minutes,” Giudici recalled. Lowe told her that he wasn’t going to “settle for anything less than a family that will center around Christ,” and he wanted to make sure she was on board.

  Giudici wasn’t particularly religious—she’d grown up Buddhist and Catholic—but she was open to converting to Christianity. (And waiting until marriage to sleep with Lowe, even though she had already lost her virginity.)

  Still, Lowe’s approach bothered her.

  “It frustrated me, because I felt like he’d had nine weeks to talk to me about this,” she said. “You choose the eleventh hour to make me feel like this? It kind of cracked my world a little bit.”

  But Lowe wanted to be certain of his decision—even if that meant asking make-it-or-break-it questions. And frankly, that’s more than most of the Bachelors and Bachelorettes on the show do before popping the question. Jesse Csincsak, the snowboarder who got engaged to DeAnna Pappas on The Bachelorette in 2008, realizes now that he did not put enough thought into proposing. One day, he just woke up and was told by producers that he was going ring shopping.

  “That’s when I freaked out. I started throwing up. I was puking on the sidewalk walking down to get the ring and coming back,” he said. “It was like, ‘Whoa. This is forever.’ My parents have been married forty-three years. That was a big freaking deal to me. I didn’t take it lightly.”

  Looking back, he knows the situation seems ridiculous—especially because he’s a “bearded man who’s around chainsaws all day”—but “you just don’t have a choice, kind of.”

  “There is no ‘What if I don’t propose’ option. It’s just ‘Here’s the ring. Go give it to her.’ That’s how they make it,” he explained. “When you’re twenty-five and you’re just a baby and you’re in a foreign place and are still hungover from the day before, they’re in your head. They make you do what they want you to do. They give you a hundred reasons why it’s a good idea and they just make it happen.”

  Schefft also recalls feeling a strange sense of obligation toward the producers. As the Bachelorette, she knew she didn’t want to marry either of her final two men, but she still didn’t feel she could end the show without picking one of them to at least continue dating.

  “The producers basically told me that I was coming across as a horrible person on television—a really cold, bitchy person,” she said. “And you’re all making a television show and you want people to watch it. I always felt like I wanted to give them what they wanted, without being crazy. I was still true to myself, but I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. You’re like, ‘This is the situation I’m in, and I’ll play along, I guess.’”

  Ben Flajnik put it almost exactly the same way: This was a game, and he wanted to play. Or, to be more accurate, he was “willing to play” because it was a TV show, and he “liked the producers enough.”

  “I think maybe I just treated it more as, ‘This is a story. Just a fun little chapter. Have fun with it. See where it goes,’” explained the winemaker, who proposed to Ashley Hebert on The Bachelorette before getting engaged to Robertson on his season of The Bachelor. “I understand engagements and proposals are supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime kind of things, but for me it was all really about seeing it through. I liked Ashley enough. You’re not really in love with a person. But Ashley was super cool, and I was like, ‘Who knows where this is gonna go?’ If she says yes, I’ll just do a very long engagement. Maybe I’m just too casual about everything, but it didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me at the time. I know it sounds strange. But it wasn’t like, ‘This is gonna be forever! This is my one and only!’ I think I just said, ‘Screw it.’”

  It’s also easier to propose when you’re not paying for the ring. Initially, the show’s stars were offered free Harry Winston or Tacori rings. Aaron Buerge, the second Bachelor, even opted to pay for an engagement ring himself—and when he and teacher Helene Eksterowicz broke up in 2004, they put it up for sale on eBay. (They got $28,300 for the ring, which they split.)

  Meredith Phillips, the second Bachelorette, got less for her diamond, which she was told was valued at $75,000 but only appraised for $5,000.

  Nowadays, Bachelors and Bachelorettes have a trickier time selling their rings. That’s because in the years since Neil Lane became the show’s jeweler of choice in 2008, a contrac
t stipulation has dictated that couples must stay together for two years before they legally own the ring. And if they break up before that two-year mark—which, let’s be real, almost all of them do—the ring goes to “ring heaven,” Lane is fond of saying.

  Producers ask the women who make it to the finals of the show what type of ring they’d be interested in—solitaire, halo, cushion cut—and then Lane brings six diamonds from his Beverly Hills storefront for the men to choose from. The size and value of the rings has increased substantially since the show began. The first one the jeweler provided to Jason Mesnick in 2009 was valued at $65,000: 3.18 carats, with 170 stones surrounding the center diamond. In 2016, however, Lauren Bushnell scored the priciest ring so far from Ben Higgins: a 4.25-carat diamond encircled with 240 round and baguette-cut diamonds. The Art Deco–style ring was supposedly worth $100,000.

  The show has been a fantastic marketing ploy for Lane, who has since partnered on collections with midpriced retailers Jared and Kay Jewelers. The most expensive Lane option either of the stores offers is $19,999, but the majority of the designs go for between $3,000 and $4,000. And while he’s always catered to high-end clientele, since he started working with the television franchise, his diamonds have become a staple on the red carpet. Angelina Jolie had on two of his diamond brooches when she wore that dress with the thigh-high split to the 2012 Academy Awards, Lorde donned one of his elaborate necklaces at the 2015 Golden Globes to glam up her crop top, and Jennifer Lawrence put her own spin on one of his diamond-chain necklaces at the 2014 Oscars, when she wore the piece backward.

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  The Bachelor franchise has played a large role in the wedding industrial complex, starting with the televised nuptials between Trista and Ryan Sutter in 2003. ABC spent $4 million to put together the three-part special, much of which focused on the couple selecting the over-the-top touches that would be featured in the wedding. Celebrity wedding planner Mindy Weiss—who has created extravagant bashes for stars like Ellen DeGeneres, Channing Tatum, and Fergie—was assigned to cater to Trista’s every whim. (Weiss has gone on to plan the TV weddings of other Bachelor couples, including J. P. and Ashley Rosenbaum and Sean and Catherine Lowe.)

  No expense was spared, and the pricey details were all over the media: $150,000 on food, $15,000 for the cake, $250,000 for the wedding party’s wardrobe. Trista got to walk down the aisle in Badgley Mischka, Stuart Weitzman, and Tacori—all Hollywood-favored designers. The flowers came from Mark’s Garden, who provides blooms for the Governors Ball after the Oscars. Trista and Ryan even designed china at Lenox for their reception; Lenox dishware has been seen in the White House.

  Stephanie Coontz, the marriage expert, says the modern-day obsession with spending so much on weddings harks back to nineteenth-century visions of marriage as being the highlight of a woman’s life.

  “And in addition to that, there’s a little bit of magical thinking,” Coontz said. “People know there’s a high chance of divorce. So I think that there’s also a sense in which people think, ‘Well, if we can make this the most special day that shows our own special, individualized perfection for each other, then this will protect us in some way. It’s a sign that we’re going to make it.’”

  Trista and Ryan’s costly affair not only inspired millions of wide-eyed would-be brides but future Bachelor contestants too. According to Jesse Csincsak, Mike Fleiss offered him and DeAnna Pappas $750,000 to get married on TV after their engagement. But his fiancée was not pleased with that number, and said, “I want a million dollars, like Trista,” Csincsak recalled. (Pappas—now DeAnna Pappas Stagliano—said she would talk to me but then stopped responding to my messages.)

  “And at that point, that’s when our relationship became a business,” Csincsak said. “It was all dollar signs. I was like, ‘Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars? Is there a free option? Because I’ll take that.’ Mike just responded by saying, ‘I’m worth twenty million. I’m offering you seven hundred and fifty thousand. You’re going to take it, or I’m going to bury you.’”

  Csincsak and Stagliano never made it to the altar, quickly realizing that they weren’t as compatible as they’d thought during The Bachelorette. Which is obviously a situation that so many Bach contestants find themselves in. So what happens after the cameras stop rolling that makes everything so different? How—just months after a beautiful proposal in the Bahamas where Csincsak and Stagliano declared they were soul mates—did things go so wrong?

  At first, Csincsak said, their relationship was great. They spent a few days in the Bahamas, holed up in a hotel room, reveling in their whirlwind courtship. Then they each flew back to their different home states, meeting up every few weeks for the “Happy Couples”—secret rendezvous in L.A. organized by the producers that allow for contestants to get in some face time while the show is still airing. The couples are given code names—Csincsak and Stagliano were Popeye and Olive, the Lowes were Bonnie and Clyde—and sometimes even fly into separate airports to avoid paparazzi.

  It’s during these Happy Couples meet-ups—and hours spent on the phone—that the couples really get to know each other. And sometimes, they don’t like what they uncover.

  In her 2012 book, Melissa Rycroft described how unfamiliar she was with Jason Mesnick’s day-to-day life outside of The Bachelor when they got engaged. They’d never discussed the details of his career, or whether she’d uproot her life and move from Dallas to Seattle. So their telephone calls got awkward, fast.

  “The conversations soon grew much shorter, and shallower. We didn’t seem to have a whole lot to talk about,” she wrote. “And I found myself planning out things to tell him, like I had done [on the show]. I had figured that once we were back in the real world, our relationship would just fall into place. But it just didn’t feel as natural as I had hoped.”

  The couple never ended up in the same city—but even for those who do, the transition can be tough. Catherine Lowe readily agreed to move from her native Seattle to her fiancé’s home in Dallas, despite the fact that she’d have to leave her job at Amazon, family, and friends behind. Sean realized what a big deal that was: “I owe her everything because she decided to make that huge sacrifice,” he told me.

  But Catherine battled unhappiness for months after uprooting her life. Sean went to work every day, leaving her largely alone at home in a city where she knew no one. “I just kept thinking, ‘Hold out for your kids, hold out for your kids,’” she remembered. “Because I really didn’t like it here, mostly because I didn’t have my own life. Now that I’ve created it, I’m really happy that I stuck it out.”

  “I’m so glad that she’s adjusted so well now, but of course you’re going to have some tough moments when you move,” said Sean. “I think that’s one of the hardest aspects about The Bachelor; more times than not, you’re going to meet someone who isn’t from the same city and if the relationship has any chance of working, you’re going to have to live in the same city.”

  Beyond the obvious struggles of fitting in in a new location, the Lowes also had to navigate the evolving dynamic of their relationship. Catherine had spent three months competing for Sean’s attention, and he realized he’d now have to put some effort into making her feel pursued. “Like, wait a minute, I’ve got to make Catherine feel like she’s as special as she made me feel for all these weeks,” he explained. “I think it’s just a matter of absolutely making sure that she knows how much I’m in love with her and what I would do for her and how she’s the number one priority in my life.”

  It’s a formula that’s seemed to work for the couple, who welcomed their first son, Samuel, in 2016. They’re held up as a shining example of what The Bachelor can create: an engagement (between a white dude and a half-Filipina, no less), televised marriage, children, and recurring appearances on the franchise (Sean co-hosted a Bachelor in Paradise after-show). Given how rare these things are in Bachelor Nation, t
here’s a lot of pressure on the couple to uphold a healthy relationship against the odds. But Catherine, for one, says she relishes that burden.

  “I know that sounds weird,” she acknowledged. “But a commitment is so much more important than feelings, and that’s what Sean and I have really made important to us. We made a commitment to each other, and just because today I don’t feel like liking you, that doesn’t mean I’m going to be like, ‘Bye!’ You’re never going to find somebody that is always on your side. So the pressure from the public saying ‘If you guys break up, you’re just another statistic’—I think it’s good.”

  Others, not surprisingly, feel less positive about the public scrutiny. As Ben Flajnik’s season of The Bachelor aired, he became so bothered by the public’s negative reaction to his fiancée, Courtney Robertson, that he briefly called off his engagement to her. Producers had warned him that Robertson might not come off well during the show, but “it was even worse” than Flajnik expected, he said.

  “It seemed like I’d proposed to someone who lacked common sense,” he said, recalling how the model was painted as the ultimate not-here-to-make-friends villain. “You’ve gone on this television show and have decided to be a total bitch to these girls. Why couldn’t you have kept your mouth shut and flown under the radar? It would have been fine.

  “But I was going places and people would be screaming, ‘Courtney’s a bitch!’ I was still engaged to this person, but I couldn’t say anything to the person yelling at me. So I’m going, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I defending this woman who is capable of doing some of those things?’”

  About a month after the show began airing, Flajnik said, they decided to break up. Of course, fans were unaware of the couple’s private dealings. So when paparazzi caught Flajnik cozying up to other women—and the photographs were subsequently published in the tabloids—he felt even worse.