Turning in my man card

You might think that I'm an alpha male (or at least that I do a decent job of pretending to be one), but I'm pretty far from it. Sure I love beer, football, red meat, and occasionally objectifying women, but there are also plenty of things that I do, watch, or listen to that tend to counteract my alpha male status.

In fact, I think it's time that I come clean and admit the guiltiest of all of my guilty pleasures. Now, I know what you must be thinking. This has to be bad because he's already admitted to this and written about this. And yes folks, I'm afraid it is pretty bad....

I have watched the majority of this season of The Bachelorette...and I can't get enough. How this happened, I still don't really know.

For the better part of the last year I have worked on just about every Monday night from 4:30PM-1AM. It was one of the few staples of my constantly fluctuating work schedule. Then the World Cup came around and all of a sudden (thanks to the time difference) I was working from 7:30AM-5PM on Mondays.

At first it was a bit of struggle to wake up that early, but I eventually got used to it. The real curveball was deciding what to watch on Monday night. It was early to mid-June so MNF was out of the question and the shows that I normally DVR on Mondays were either in re-run mode (How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory) or not airing past episodes altogether (24, Damages).

So I started flipping through the channels and in what must have been the perfect storm of boredom and intrigue in a particularly good looking girl I gave the show a chance and within minutes I was hooked. I had heard that the show is very good and very entertaining, but I had always brushed it off because it just comes across as completely feminine (and it sort of is). Also, of the people that have mentioned how great of a show it is, most were female and just about all the males only watch with their wives or girlfriends.



It's gotten to the point now where I'm back to working on Monday nights (at least for the time being), so I DVR The Bachelorette and watch it as soon as I get home from work.

That said, here are a handful of my observations on the show....

-It's incredibly well done. Very well put together. It's literally packed with suspense and drama. I think a lot of this has to do with trying to guess who this girl likes the most and who she's going to send packing in each particular episode.

-They put these people in the most hyper-romantic places and situations possible, so it's almost hard for them not to at least fall for the allusion of being in love. Doing this obviously adds drama, intrigue, and a bit of glitz and glamour to the show, but this is fantasy world stuff. These people are hardly ever placed in real world situations, so it's hard to project whether or not their relationship would work in an everyday environment.

-Now, I could be wrong on this because this is the first season that I've seen, but I don't think the history of past contestants is very good. I know that the most recent couple from The Bachelor has already split up (because they took up about 40 minutes of one of The Bachelorette episodes a few weeks ago). I think this is a result of what I was talking about before. The show puts these people in beautiful, romantic places and atmospheres and they think they're in love and then all of a sudden somebody has to take out the trash and all hell breaks loose.

-Obviously this adds to the drama and suspense, but I don't think it's a good thing for The Bachelorette (Ali) to be so obsessed with marriage. She wants the person that she eventually picks to propose to her on the spot and she always says things like, "I know I'm going to find my husband here." To me, it's a little too aggressive.

-This chick literally makes out with everybody. It's out of control. I don't know how the target audience (which has to be women ages 16-50) is ok with this. Literally whenever she doesn't know what to say she just starts making out with whoever shes with. This can't bode well for the guys trying to marry her either. Like, it can't be a good feeling to know that your "girlfriend" is off making out with multiple other dudes when you're not with her. I don't know, I think this would be tough for me to get past.

-Sometimes I think the show is a little scripted. It sort of has a bit of The Hills feel to it from time to time. For example, one guy was only there "to become famous." He was secretly calling his girlfriend throughout the show. Another guy got a tatoo of a rose on his wrist. The guy that was the leader in the clubhouse went back to see his ex-girlfriend to "see if he was still in love with her" and showed up at her apartment with the cameras. She answered, they talked, and he "realized that he was still in love with her", so he had to fly down to Tahiti to tell Ali. I don't know, I just think it's a little too much to believe.

-When talking about other contestants some guys would say, "Oh, he's not here for the right reasons." Really? How many other reasons could someone be there for? I mean, sure you've got the guy that was apparently only there to become famous, but outside of him (and again, that must have been scripted), who isn't there to try to win this girl's heart?

-I think a lot of people watch and a lot of people go on the show because they want to believe in true love. They either want to watch or to take part in this fairy tale romance.

-The contestants and Ali all use the same words and phrases over and over and over. The all time worst is, "We have such a great connection."

-Last, but not least, Ali's down to Chris and Roberto. So, who's she going to pick? Roberto. Bank on it.