I am discussing alleged spoilers in this post. Read at your own risk!!!
It’s baffling even to me how invested I am in this season of The Bachelor. If this were fiction, everyone would be eating this up. It would be an instant sensation. Part of the allure is that Joey is so written by a woman. He’s not blocky and jock-y and devoid of personality, like previous Bachelors. He’s kind and gentle, funny and understanding. When the group date in Malta required the women to have sausages launched at their faces, he stepped up and insisted that he was playing, too, because he recognized the activity as potentially humiliating for the women. He handles every instance of trauma dumping with grace and empathy. His little asides are self-deprecating in a charming way, and his appreciation of the women is vocal and abundant. I’m taking notes so I can steal his personality for future romance novel writing.
I, personally, have been caught up in the Maria of it all. If we look at the data, her screen time is through the roof. Though she’s been in the limelight for negative, drama-filled reasons, every time she’s in the same room as Joey, their chemistry crackles. That entire Tuscan revival monstrosity of a mansion is going up in flames if they keep this up.
Pt. 1: The Romance Novel Arc
I’m Team Maria all the way. As are a lot of people. I find her so charming and lovely. She’s had a tough time of it, because she’s not willing to mince words or make herself small for anyone else. She’s a good example to other women watching, and we see her have this effect on Joey as if she’s lighting him up. He’s giggly and silly, blushing, unable to keep his hands off of her. In the back of a limo on their date, she tries to get him to say a colorful phrase in French and when she leans over and whispers its meaning in his ear, he raises his eyebrow like every leading man in a romance novel and says, “I would have said it.” They’re compelling together, like they bring out the best in one another.
This episode gave us a bonafide romance novel. I was watching, kicking my feet and giggling. Maria and Joey have this beautiful day together. They’re all over each other in the back of that car, she gets the coveted shopping spree date1, they get a private concert by Feist! They both seem very emotionally overwhelmed by what they’re feeling. There were a lot of tears this episode, but when Maria starts crying at dinner, they aren’t sad tears. She’s so happy, and probably relieved that she managed to jump the hurdles in her way and get this time, one-on-one. We don’t see Joey crying at all, but in one of his ITMS, his eyes are red-rimmed and glassy, like he’s also overcome with emotion. And as a spectator, it was also overwhelming for me to watch, because it was so real. This is probably the first time, in all my years spent watching The Bachelor, that I’ve believed what I’m seeing2.
And they’re not going to end up together. I mean, I’ll have to hold out hope that she’ll become the Bachelorette, but if someone looked at me the way Joey looked at her when he said “je t’aime” the second time— all while pretending he had no idea what he was saying? This is the romance writer in me, but I’m so invested in this particular scene that I screenshotted it and made it the main photo for this newsletter. Please, scroll back up and look at the expression, the intimacy, and then try to tell me there’s justice in the world for Joey to end up with a sweet, blonde girl instead of this hot firecracker with a loud mouth. Sure, we can operate under the assumption that Joey didn’t know what he was saying, but if he did? This is like your worst situationship, who doesn’t want to be your boyfriend but needs to keep you on the line, popping back into your life and telling you he loves you after ghosting you for five months. Devastating.
The TikTok comment section has ensured that I know exactly how this season ends— or some version of how it ends, at least, because people with absolutely no lives (ya know, like the kind of people who might spend their time writing Bachelor think-pieces) have sleuthed out that it appears as if Joey and Kelsey A. were recently in the same place. Where it’s Daisy or Kelsey A., it’s still someone other than Maria. And knowing how it ends made it really hard to watch Maria’s one-on-one. There’s something so real between them, even if it’s just chemistry. It’s palpable. I can taste it through the screen, so I can’t even imagine being one of the people in the relationship.
Now, if this were a romance novel, that would be the third act breakup. This would be the part where Joey chooses someone else, the safe option, because he’s afraid of what he feels for Maria. And Maria leaves, broken hearted, and they’re both miserable for a while. And then he realizes he made a mistake, because he doesn’t want safe, he doesn’t want sweet. He wants something real, even when it’s scary and overwhelming, even if it would be easier to take the path of least resistance. And he makes a big gesture to fix things, boombox outside the window, embarrassingly earnest speech in front of a crowd, the whole nine yards. Trust me, romance novels are the one thing I am kind of an expert on.
Pt. 2: Can’t make a housewife out of a hoe
This episode begins with a fun little Joey breakdown. We’re six weeks into this journey and things are getting tense and overwhelming. This is the most content we get about Joey, himself, and it perfectly encapsulates what I’m seeing: “I’m trying to do my best to express how I feel and show who I am. It just– it’s hard to do that while also trying to be fun and be more light. Sometimes that’s just not me. I’m not this like, super energetic ‘here we go!’ Joey. Like, that’s not who I am.” Then a producer asks, “Why do you feel like you need to be perfect?” And Joey’s answer is, “I don’t feel like I need to be perfect. I feel like people expect me to be,” then adds, “I’ve always been my biggest critic and I’m afraid of someone not accepting me for me.”
There are two things to unpack here. First, the need to be perfect. Joey says he doesn’t feel like he needs to be perfect, but that others expect him to be. He’s being crushed under the weight of those expectations— perceived or otherwise. And he ends up exactly playing into it, by trying to be perfect, by analyzing his own behavior and holding himself back because he’s clearly not secure in his belief that he’s good enough. This mindset is probably already setting him up for failure. He’s so focused on doing the good, perfect thing that he’s not even listening to his internal compass. He doesn’t trust himself, and when that happens, it almost always ends badly.
The second thing is that he’s afraid someone else will get close enough to see whatever flaws he has and leave him because of them. Obviously no one is perfect, everyone has flaws and people love us, anyway. In terms of his character arc, this sets Joey up as the person being left. We don’t know how the rest of the season plays out, but it’s being heavily implied that someone is going to bow out of the competition and be the one to reject him. Which is something that happens almost every season. Someone makes it almost to the end and gets cold feet, or was only in it for the Instagram fame and needs to get the fuck out of there before they accidentally end up engaged, or a contestant’s insecurity gets the better of them and they leave for their own mental health. But for someone whose confidence is already on shaky ground, being rejected could really send Joey into a spiral.
And that brings us to how Joey’s going to make his choice. His desperation to be perfect is going to translate into choosing the perfect partner. Not perfect for him, in the way so many relationships operate— no one else has to get it, because the partnership just makes sense. But perfect as in this person I’ve chosen for myself is above reproach. No one can accuse me of having chosen incorrectly because this person is, objectively, an ideal partner. Even if it’s not the person who would, theoretically, be perfect for him.
I think The Bachelor is successful as a social experiment. With all of these options in front of them, can they be trusted to know their own hearts well enough to choose someone who they really want or feel a connection with? Or will they choose someone they’ve been conditioned by society to believe is the correct choice, the person everyone should want, so they should want that person, too? If we put Maria and Daisy side by side and compare them (yes, I’m pitting two women against each other, but only for a minute, I swear!) we can see the contrast. On the surface, Daisy is blonde and sweet, mild-mannered and polite. Maria has dark, flowing hair, exaggerated features and a body that demands to be shown off as much as possible. Daisy literally grew up on a Christmas tree farm, and her narrative arc has been focused on how she’s overcome adversity after losing her hearing. Maria’s “let me slip into something more comfortable” bit placed a target on her back and set the stage for drama. She throws herself into conflict; Daisy stays out of it and focuses on her connection with Joey. Daisy spends her time with Joey talking about baby names. Maria is framed as being hyper-sexual, a sex object in both Joey’s eyes and the audience’s.
Maria is not the girl you marry. That’s the stereotype, right? For a woman to be wife material, she must be quiet and sweet. She shouldn’t be overtly sexual or, god forbid, own her own sexuality. That’s the patriarchal idea of the Right Woman. The right woman for a man to be with. And the right woman for a woman to strive to be. If you’re not that kind of woman, you should feel shame about it. I actually tried to look up more about this, but my search history quickly became incredibly concerning. Right under a link for a book that I’m sure would be enlightening, titled Why Men Marry Some Women and not Others by John T. Molloy, was a “Red Pilled Woman” subreddit. I clicked away with speed I didn’t even know I was capable of. All we need to know, without going down an alt-right incel rabbithole, is that this stereotype is commonplace and insidious. There are phrases like can’t make a housewife out of a hoe that imply the woman you find sexually arousing can’t be the same one to engage in a partnership with. If you look at the comments on The Bachelor’s social media, plenty of people are chiming in to say that all Joey and Maria have is sexual chemistry, and they don’t “see her as his wife.” Why? Is sexual chemistry not a slice of the relationship pie? There are other factors, sure, but to discredit raw chemistry as if it’s meaningless is stupid and misogynistic. Like a romantic partnership doesn’t include sex, like a woman who has sex is unworthy of love.
I’m sure Daisy is perfectly nice. Some people love her, praising her sweetness and purity. Some have said she’s getting an obvious Bachelorette edit, which I personally don’t see. I think, like most undercover frontrunners, she seems boring as hell. Maybe she does have a personality under there, but she’s being praised for things that have nothing to do with a relationship. You don’t have to be sweet and demure to be an acceptable choice for a man, to be a good partner, to be worthy of being loved. “She’s nice” doesn’t translate to “her and Joey seem like a compatible match.” In past seasons, the winners have received an edit specifically designed to keep them shielded from criticism. For example, on Nick’s season, Vanessa and Rachel got into a few fights and none of them made the final cut because one was Nick’s fiancée and the other was the Bachelorette. Maybe that’s what’s happening here, but to serve us up a beautiful romance between Maria and Joey, one that we aren’t seeing mirrored in his other relationships, just to rip it away from us is confusing, to say the least. It’s like no matter how charming and endearing a woman like Maria is, it won’t matter in the end because she’s the wrong choice for a wife.
Conclusion: These are real people
And here’s my concession: this isn’t a romance novel. This is someone’s real life— many people’s real lives, actually. I can’t watch an edited, trimmed down rendition of eight weeks and decide I know what’s best for this person I’ve never met. If Joey chose Daisy, there must be a reason that the framing of the show doesn’t convey to us as the audience. And I can speculate that the reason there’s such a low rate of Bachelor/Bachelorette success stories is because they’re under pressure to make an acceptable choice and don’t know their own minds well enough to make the choice for themselves, but I have no idea what the truth is.
I have no idea if Hannah B. would be married right now if she’d just picked Tyler C. instead of Jed, or what Rachel Lindsay’s or Katie Thurston’s lives would look like if certain men— frontrunners Peter (on Rachel’s season) and Greg (on Katie’s season)— hadn’t gotten cold feet and bowed out. Arie actually did get the rom-com ending. He made a choice that felt like a safer bet, and then regretted it, fixed it, and ended up with the woman he really loved. And now they’re married with a million kids.
If Joey and Daisy are together and happy, then good. If he’s with Kelsey A., also good. I wouldn’t want to be either of those women met with some criticism that Joey only picked them because it was what he was “supposed” to do, and not because that’s what he really wanted. I’m trying to unpack my feelings about this in a gentle way, not that I think any of the parties involved will stumble upon this humble Substack.
And I’m not going to parse through past seasons of The Bachelor to prove my point, but I do think winners are presented in a certain way, and also that winners fall into an archetype of blonde and (sorry) bland. A big personality doesn’t win you a husband. Being sexy and forward doesn’t catch you a man. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that so many leads have the exact same type. Or maybe it’s the deeply ingrained influence of our patriarchal society rearing its ugly head. Who can say!
TL;DR: brb writing Joey/Maria fanfic
Sorry, that’s a lie. I’m a Hannah B./Tyler C. truther till I die, and they had great chemistry.