Final Project

Cinderella Doesn’t Always Get a Happy Ending
By Kelly Arnes

Once upon a time there lived a man. He was a lonely man, a handsome man. All he wanted in life was to find a wife and live happily ever after. To make his dream come true, he called on his fairy godmother to produce 25 lovely women for him to choose his wife from. After eight weeks of dating all 25 women, he proposed to the one he had fallen in love with. He and his fiancé lived in bliss for the rest of their lives.

Fairy tales and make believe are what little girls grow up on. We sit in bed and wait for the next Disney story to be revealed to us, or for the really imaginative story teller, a completely original take on the love story. The great thing about fairy tales is that there is always a happy ending. Too bad reality doesn’t work the same way. It would be nice to have 25 men come knock on my door (I could use a little ego boost), but the reality comes all too quickly. Men and women don’t like to share, and when tempers and emotions run high, drama ensues. ABC’s “The Bachelor” plays on the fantasies of its audience as well as on their craving for drama.

In the craze of the reality television outbreak, ABC created the show in response to the success of CBS with their top ranking show Survivor. Created by Mike Fleiss, the show quickly became a success with young female viewers. Women love the show because it combines the fairy tale aspect with the drama and heart ache that they want to see but not experience.

The show is the worst way to find true love that anyone has come up with yet. If the purpose of the show was to provide entertainment for women who love to see other women crash and burn at their love lives, then this show would be perfect. That is not what the producers of the show indicate is the basis behind the show, the line they tell is a man trying to find true love.

Even if the saying “there’s someone for everyone” is true, what are the chances that that one person is one of the 25 questionably sane contestants on the show? The success rate of the men who go on the show is at 0%, meaning none of the men who have been “Bachelors” are currently married to women who have gone on the show. Out of 12 seasons, there were no happily ever after. So I guess that answers the previous question, there is a slim to none chance of my soul mate being one of the 25 men that knock on my door, because they want to have their 15 minutes of fame.

When the glitz and glamour are removed, finding true love isn’t as easy as the stories make it seem. The amount of happily married couples in the U.S. today is at about 50%, a down right depressing number. With this insight it’s not hard to see why shows like The Bachelor are alluring to women, it brings back the idea of fairy tales and riding off into the sunset.

The question arises after season one, why do people keep signing up to be on the show, and the answer is not clear. After the first season of The Bachelor, ABC created a spin off The Bachelorette. Season one of the spin off is the most successful of the two shows combined, the couple is “happily” married with a child, and they are the only couple that has been able to marry and stay together for longer than a year.

The drive to be on television and to find true love leads 25 women to compete for the attention of one guy. These women live together for up to eight weeks of their lives and form relationships with the other women in the house as well as trying to win the affection of the one and only man on the screen. This affection starts out as winning a date with him, either in the form of a group date or a one-on-one date. The affection intensifies as time goes on and the audience is allowed to peak into the more intimate kiss scenes.

The chronology of events meshes with the social norms of dating, what doesn’t add up is all of this happing with multiple women at the same time. On the current season of The Bachelor, Jason Mesnick, who was passed over in the last season of The Bachelorette, had kissed about half of the contestants on the show by the time week four rolls around. This open polygamy adds a twist to the already challenging task of maintaining relationships.

The drama that unfolds with the women living in close proximity to one another and the relationships that develop between them adds a new layer to the drama craving of the typical audience member. The people who watch the show become invested in the lives of the women in the house as well as the bachelor. Just google “The bachelor” and about 50 different blogs are available to look at. The audience voices their opinions about everything, from who should get the first rose to who should get the final rose.

The general public deals with stresses everyday, from traffic jams on the way to work, to getting a pink slip and no longer having a place to work. It is a natural counter measure from these nightmares to find an escape. The Bachelor and shows similar to it do not provide an escape; if anything it adds another stressor. The way that the show is set up, it falsely depicts the courtship of a man and a woman. The real world doesn’t work that way, and real dating doesn’t work like that either. We may grow up on fairy tales, but at some point we have to face reality. Continuing a show that not only gets the hopes up of the contestants on it, but gets the hopes of its audience is a disgrace.