One difference between me and Desiree Hartsock, this season’s bachelorette, is that I’m cursed with the inability to fall in love with someone who mistakes verbs for adjectives. Des, to her credit, is more forgiving.
And maybe if I were being courted by Brooks, I’d forgive him too. Sweet, gentle, pretty Brooks, Brooks of the prominent cheekbones and shampoo-commercial hair. What I wouldn’t give for hair like Brooks’. Thick, shiny, luscious, undulant-adjectives don’t come close to doing hair like his justice. Brooks has hair you want to make a home in.
He and Des were cruising in a Smart car convertible through the subtropical forests of Madeira Island (“a hidden pearl in the Atlantic,” as Zak W., another contestant, put it), just laughing, having fun, being themselves, and living in the moment.
This was Brooks’ second one-on-one, so he knew Des was into him-but how into him Back at the villa, there were four other dudes doing chin-ups, drinking smoothies, and hoping to end up Des’ husband.
They all had prominent cheekbones, too, and Michael and Drew both had hair almost as beautiful. Brooks needed to know where he stood with Des. He knew she liked him, but did she love him “We need more adjectives,” he said, meaning verbs.
It was a moment that reminded me why I continue to watch The Bachelor(ette), even its weaker seasons-and this season is one of the weakest in recent memory.
Des is a lousy bachelorette. She’s too reserved, too unsure of herself; her speech is too effortful. In conversation her reactions are weirdly delayed, as if she has to tell herself, “Someone said something: React!” Her response to anything tender or flattering or sincere is to say, “Ohhhh! That’s so cute!”-not because she’s patronizing, it seems, but because she doesn’t know what else to say.
You get the sense she doesn’t feel she really deserves to be the bachelorette, which is fatal: Every bachelor and bachelorette should feel, deep down, that their whole lives have been merely a preparation for these few awful and wonderful weeks during which they are privileged to choose their wives or husbands from a pool of 25 eager candidates. Des doesn’t project the requisite pathological self-confidence.
Here’s why her season-and any bad season of The Bachelor(ette)-is nevertheless worth watching: No other cultural product today so consistently and entertainingly dramatizes the inadequacy of the English language in the face of love, or whatever it is that without fail seems to actually develop, despite our skepticism, between the show’s star and one or more of its contestants. Brooks, while grammatically confused, is right: We do need more words to talk about how we feel. There should be nameable gradations on the spectrum between like and love. “I lurve you,” says Woody Allen’s character to Annie Hall. “I loave you, I luff you.” He’s got the right idea.
Bachelor(ette) viewers are liable to experience multiple sensations of d
