Recapping the (not so) Golden Bachelor finale

I came out of Bachelor retirement to write this.

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Hello friends. We meet again. Some of you might remember when I used to recap The Bachelor/ette as though it were sports — first for USA Today and then for SB Nation. I started the whole thing because Aaron Rodgers’ brother Jordan (who is now a sports broadcaster himself) was one of the contestants (he is now married to the then-Bachelorette JoJo Fletcher). Then I got swept up in it and covered the show for several seasons. Writing about the The Bachelor is where my opinions like “sports is reality television” and “sports is socially acceptable gossip for men” and “reality TV is sports” began to form (that would later morph into “Is it sports?”).

I eventually stopped and regained some parts of my brain that I’d lost after hearing countless repetitions of “will you accept this rose?” and “you’re not here for the right reasons.” I thought I was free. It became boring to watch 25-year-olds pretend to want love when they really wanted fame. There’s nothing wrong with wanting fame and using a reality show with a dumb premise — 30 women and one man —  to do it. This version just didn’t make for compelling television anymore.

Not when shows like Love Is Blind found an even crueler, more chaotic way to film people trying to get famous while they find their soulmates. 

And then the evil geniuses of Bachelor Nation came up with a way to reel me back in. They found a 72-year-old named Gerry Turner (who’s name is pronounced Gairy…I know….) from Indiana. He seemed like he was made in a lab to be the first “Golden Bachelor,” which is the name the producers decided on instead of “The Bachelor: 60+.” Gerry’s wife of 43 years, Toni, died six years ago. The way the show presented it, Gerry has been bereft ever since, unable to mend his broken heart. 

Until recently, when he suddenly decided that the best way to mend a broken heart would be to go on reality television. A few months ago he began his “journey” with 30 stunning older women, greeting them outside the Bachelor Mansion, and we were off to the races. America fell in love with this seemingly sweet soul; finally, a man there for the right reasons, an older guy with good manners and a pure heart, looking for his last shot at love. The women were fully formed adults, with families and histories, sassy and funny and earnest in ways that younger contestants are not (although I do think some of those women were only there to get famous, which I love — work it, April). The dead franchise was revived. Ratings soared.

If Gerry seemed made in a lab, it’s because he was. The Hollywood Reporter recently published a damning article making it clear that Gerry’s tan wasn’t the only thing the show had faked for the cameras. It lied to viewers about his job (he is not a restauranteur and he hasn’t been retired since he was 55) and neglected to mention that he’d recently had a girlfriend of three years named Carolyn.

The relationship allegedly started a month after his wife died, and Gerry’s had a few other relationships since then, too. The Bachelor also didn’t mention how horribly Gerry treated Carolyn (a woman he met at work who was 14 years his junior), according to THR. Read the article. It’s fine for Gerry to date after his wife died — I don’t think it’s fine for the show to lie about it, and for Gerry to be such a willing participant. But I also know how manipulative reality TV producers can be.

Folks, I knew something was up with Gerry from the beginning. Didn’t trust him. How does one guy go from loving only one woman to choosing from a bevy of America’s hottest “ladies” and not feel weird about it? He’d go from crying about his wife to making out with several different women in .2 seconds. It seemed like a red flag. He appeared to enjoy juggling women too much to be a truly honest, Aw Shucks Man from the midwest. 

In order to be a good Bachelor lead, you have to love being in front of cameras, and you must have no problem making everything completely about you. Gerry was an amazing Bachelor lead.

*Deep sigh* okay, well, seeing as I’ve been sucked back in, let’s recap the finale for old time’s sake. 

We begin in Costa Rica, with plenty of b-roll shots of green mountains and iguanas to prove it. We are immediately placed in a room with Gerry, his two daughters, and his two granddaughters. Everyone is very sweaty. They’re about to meet Theresa, one of the two women Gerry must choose between. For context: on their overnight date a day ago — where Gerry and Theresa definitely “knocked boots,” as they put it — Gerry sat down to dinner and asked Theresa what her job was. 

He asked the woman he might propose to in a few days WHAT HER JOB WAS. 

Theresa, who is 70, was like, oh, you wanna know what I do? She proceeded to tell Gerry that after getting married at 18 and raising a family, she taught herself how to day trade at the age of 46 and quickly rose through the ranks of financial institutions. She is now a senior compliance and operations liaison at a company called TFS Wealth Management.

Theresa wasn’t the frontrunner for most of the season; Gerry seemed more into Leslie and Faith. Theresa has a big, doe-eyed quality to her. She comes across as positive and soothing, and you could see the wheels turning in Gerry’s head when he realized she’s also got her shit together and she’s good with money. Her husband of 42 years died nine years ago, so she and Gerry have bonded over what it’s like to lose a spouse.

Anyway, when Gerry’s family meets Theresa, they love her. Because, when they ask her if she’ll 100% marry their dad, she immediately says yes. 

A few hours later, we accompany Gerry and Theresa on their last date. They make out a lot, and all of Theresa’s red lipstick ends up on Gerry’s mouth. Gerry looks like he’s going to a pickleball game, while Theresa looks like she’s going clubbing. Theresa says she’d be heartbroken if Gerry didn’t chose her, but that she really just wants his happiness. 

Gerry likes this line a lot. He tells Theresa he loves her. 

Leslie, Gerry, and Theresa.

Okay. Next day. We’re back in the same room with Gerry’s kids and it’s time to meet Leslie, who is 64. Everybody is still sweaty. Leslie is a fitness and dance instructor from Minneapolis who has been divorced twice and says she dated Prince. The narrative she tells about herself on the show is that men never choose her, or she never chooses the right one. She’s convinced Gerry is the right one. So maybe she’s right about her choices.

Leslie makes the fatal mistake of telling Gerry’s kids that the idea of “til death do us part” initially made her anxious. But then she says, “in Gerry fashion, he made me feel really comfortable and secure. And I said [til death do us part] is what I want, too.”

I’ve watched enough Bachelor to know that if you express any doubt — even a tiny, human, normal amount of doubt because you’re on a reality show where you’re supposed to marry someone you’ve known for six weeks — to the lead’s family, the family will tell the lead, and that will generally tank your chances of ending up with the lead. 

Which is indeed what happens.

Gerry’s kids tell him that they’re not sure Leslie is ready for forever, even though that’s not what Leslie told them at all, and you can see Gerry completely shift gears. Leslie is out. She knows it, too. They’re sitting on the steps outside his little villa thingy, and he’s being so weird. He’s like, “don’t you have to go?” and then there is this bizarre silence before he awkwardly says:

“Okay? Alright. Yeah. It’s probably time for me to take off. Okay? Alright. Give me a big fat hug.”

Reader, that’s where the heebie jeebies kicked in big time for me. A big fat hug? This man wields intimacy as a weapon. 

Anyway, now it’s the nighttime date, and Gerry clams up as Leslie sits there crying because she knows something is off. He keeps trying to tell her nothing is wrong, even though he knows he’s going to break up with her. He says, “give me a big hug, let me feel it.”

Again!

Then Gerry tells Leslie to cheer up. She cheers up, and he says that he’s glad she’s back to her “normal self,” which is bullshit, because women are still themselves when they are upset. Gerry even lets Leslie give him a leather-bound book featuring photos of them, with many blank pages for their future together. Gerry says one of the photos was a “hot moment.”

“I can’t imagine being without you now,” Leslie says. 

“That’s huge,” Gerry says. 

“I love you very, very much,” Leslie says. 

“That’s such a special sentiment,” Gerry says. 

Obviously, after some crying and leaving and coming back, Gerry breaks up with Leslie. Leslie is sobbing. She’s devastated. She keeps saying, “so everything you told me was a lie.” She says that Gerry told her she was the one, and that when the cameras weren’t rolling on their overnight date, they made plans that made her think she was 100% the woman he wanted to end up with.

“Be happy,” Gerry says to her, clearly not wanting to deal with any of the pain he has caused.

Gerry has a meltdown after this. The host, Jesse Palmer, whose job is to show up and say, “ladies, it’s time for the final rose,” appears. He and Gerry are wearing matching beige outfits. Jesse comforts Gerry while Gerry says he never would have done this if he knew how much he’d hurt people, but this week he told The New York Times he has no regrets. In fairness, Gerry was playing the game. He just played it too hard with too many women. I’d guess it was encouraged by producers.

Anyway, in the morning, Gerry proposes to Theresa. But he does so by saying, “I came to the conclusion that you’re not the right person for me to live with…”

AND THEN PAUSING FOR A LONG TIME!

Theresa is like “oh, okay, okay,” and almost starts to cry right before Gerry says, “....you’re the person I can’t live without!” 

Ladies, if a man proposes to you like this, run for the hills. Again, it’s probably something the producers told him to do. Theresa says yes. 

Some thoughts

Throughout the series, I’ve been pretty confident that Gerry would end up with Theresa, because she was presented as the platonic ideal of a Wife. Some of the other women on the show had been divorced, or never found true love, and Gerry seemed into them for a time.

But I was pretty sure that Gerry would listen to the part of his brain programmed by the patriarchy that wanted a woman whom he thought could take care of him. Theresa was in a 42-year marriage — Gerry says he realized she knew how to “maintain a long relationship.” I’m guessing she didn’t come across as “damaged” to him, or talk about insecurities or fears that Gerry would have to help her wrestle with. 

Because Gerry kept saying, through the whole season, that this was his journey. He says he led Leslie and other women on to such extremes because he had to be “all in” in order for “the process to work.” 

The problem is that this wasn’t just Gerry’s journey. This was also the journey of the women he supposedly cared about. And if you care about someone enough to potentially marry her, you should probably keep her feelings in mind. I think Leslie dodged a bullet.

The nature of shows like The Bachelor is that they dangle the carrot of love — they prey on the idea of “happily ever after,” without ever showing the after. The thing that crushes contestants who make it far might not always be that they don’t get to marry the guy in front of them, it’s that they don’t get to marry anyone. They go home alone. They’re back where they started. The carrot is yanked away. 

When a 25-year-old leaves the Bachelor mansion, sobbing and saying she’ll “never find love,” you know she could probably be married by age 30 if she wanted. When a woman in her 60s or 70s leaves and says the same thing, it carries more weight. They’ve lived lives — they know heartbreak. It’s harder to bullshit them with platitudes like, “everything’s gonna be fine.” Many of the women whom Gerry dumped still appeared genuinely hurt at the reunion shows. They seemed to take it harder than their younger counterparts usually do.

At the same time, a lot of the women on the show have carried water for The Golden Bachelor, saying it empowered them to realize they can still find love, that it’s never too late. They say that people from around the world have reached out to tell them it’s made them believe in love again, no matter how old they are.

I certainly hope that that’s mostly the case. The best part of being on a reality show is when it airs and you’re suddenly beloved (if you’re lucky — otherwise, you’re at least famous). What I really hope is that grandkids across the country are sliding into these Golden Women’s DMs on behalf of their kind, hot, single grandfathers. 

I do believe it’s important to put older people — especially older women — on television. We live in a ageist society. It’s necessary to show that you can still be sexy and vibrant and funny (and even awful) as you age, because of course you can. You’re just a person. But there is an aspect of “look how cute they are” that felt deeply condescending. And making some of these women get crushed publicly, just so that one guy could find his second wife and execs could make a lot of money off of them? Doesn’t feel super golden to me.