The Interlude

If 2020 is a hot mess, Election Day-Turned-Week was a dumpster fire. I wasn’t sleeping, I was glued to a screen at all times, and I lost brain cells worrying about the fate of democracy. In a year where everything is, yes, unprecedented, I’ve been clinging to any semblance of normalcy to help me stay grounded. And unfortunately for me, one of the few constants in my life is The Bachelorette.

Pre-pandemic, I considered not watching The Bachelor franchise anymore. Over the years, it’s dwindled from being my problematic fave to simply being… problematic. The premise of the show itself is, of course, sexist: dozens of women vie for the attention, approval, and love of one man, who can send them packing at the snap of a finger. It often portrays women as overly emotional, irrational, and whiny. The franchise has also been (rightfully) called out for its racist history — in its nearly 20-year history, only one Black Bachelorette has ever been cast, and the series will feature its first Black Bachelor next season.

More recently, Peter Weber’s season kinda sucked. Viewers spent much of the season picking a new villain every few weeks. And by the season finale, Bachelor Nation resented Weber more than the women who sparred for his love. I couldn’t figure out why I still kept watching the show — I had started it in high school, mostly to have an excuse to hang out in my friend’s basement on a school night — but all I knew for sure was that I didn’t care to watch more from the franchise anytime soon.

And then the pandemic hit. To put it lightly, the last eight months have been terrible. I’m extremely grateful that I was able to move home and be with my family, but my mental health declined and improved in waves. Graduating without any job prospects, in my basement, and away from my friends and a city I had begun to view as home was crushingly anticlimactic. I had a hard time creating any normalcy in my day-to-day life. I spent much of the summer feeling anxious, crying in the middle of the day, missing my friends, fighting with my 16-year-old sister — who’s also dealing with the pandemic at a fragile age — and feeling like working my ass off for years ultimately didn’t matter.

As the fall rolled around and I began to land on my feet with freelance work, I still found myself clinging onto anything that gave me some sort of routine: walking my dog at 11 a.m. every day, weekly Zoom calls with friends, and daily sunset drives around my hometown. The weeks leading up to the election became more and more chaotic, and my anxiety peaked during election week itself. So when The Bachelorette rolled around in October, I was excited to have a weekly escape. Every day of the news cycle (and my early onset quarter-life crisis) brought new waves of stress, but going back to watching The Bachelorette gave me the same comfort as putting on an old sweatshirt from high school.

I’m not going to say that The Bachelorette revived my sense of stability. To be honest, watching it this year has given me more stress. This season, featuring Clare Crawley, became more awkward as it progressed — from Crawley declaring contestant Dale Moss her future husband on the first night, to becoming upset with the men when they didn’t leap to speak with her, to hosting cringey group dates that rubbed contestants — and viewers — the wrong way. I would pause each episode every 10 minutes because I needed to cool off. It almost felt like this season was engineered to be as chaotic as this year. But while The Bachelor franchise can be a train wreck, it’s one that I’m always prepared for.

If you’re keeping up with this season, you know that Tuesday nights are for The Bachelorette. But during the first week of November, the show was rescheduled for Thursday night to make room for a different dysfunctional fiasco: Election Day. (I had honestly kind of forgotten about The Bachelorette, given the state of democracy and all.) And on Nov. 5, as the country waited — to no avail — for Nevada or Arizona or Georgia or Pennsylvania (or, honestly, anyone) to finish counting their votes, a coworker reminded me that she would be simultaneously watching both the election results and long-awaited episode where former Bachelor contestant Tayshia Adams replaced Crawley after she became engaged to Moss.

My few remaining brain cells physically felt the reprieve. After watching nonstop coverage of an election that seemed to move like a snail, I was excited to give myself a break and watch literally anything else. And, of course, Bachelor fans who have been suffering through the season thus far were rewarded when the months-long rumors came true, and Adams became the new Bachelorette. A longtime favorite, Adams brought a change of pace that excited me and probably everyone else in Bachelor Nation.

It was a messy pivot during an already-chaotic season. But while this season of The Bachelorette has sometimes felt too cringey to watch, it was nice (in a sort of twisted way) to watch a more-or-less inconsequential reality show instead of watching a former reality show host try to cling to his last remaining bits of power in this country. And it was also nice to pretend that in a year where it feels like life was turned upside down, I had something that I had once enjoyed in my past life to look forward to.

Is it ridiculous for me to say that it’s a little poetic that we got a new Bachelorette and a new President-elect in the same week? Yeah. 100%. But did they both bring me a little relief in a time where every day feels like a chore and the future is terrifyingly uncertain? Also yes. After the first week of November, it has felt like a little bit of order was restored to the world. There’s a long, chaotic, grim road ahead, but it feels like we’ve landed on one foot, at least. And as we plow through an unsettling transition period, I’m looking forward to escaping the madness with The Bachelorette’s routine insanity.

This story is part of Reality TV Week. Check out the other stories here.