The Bachelor has always been my guilty pleasure. I would lust over the leading man every single season. The doctor, pilot, pro athlete... it didn't really matter what they did, as long as they ticked the two most important boxes: over six feet and able to pull off a tux.
Ever since I worked on The Bachelor Australia, however, I haven't been able to watch a full episode. Not one.
And it's not because of the current controversy happening with The Bachelorette star Taylor Frankie Paul, whose season has been canceled amid an ongoing domestic violence investigation.
Well, as they say, never meet your idols - and never work on your favorite reality show either. The joy has been completely sucked out of it.
What goes on behind the scenes is not just a little manufactured, it's a full-blown, carefully orchestrated machine - which is far less romantic, but, frankly, far more fascinating.
Before I completely ruin the illusion for you, let me explain how I ended up there in the first place. The production team stumbled across my blog, High Heels and Hangovers, while casting their leading man and asked if I'd be interested in helping.
And just like that, I was paid to approach good-looking men in bars, sporting matches and even on their lunch breaks to ask if they were single and open to finding love on national television.
It was as fun as it sounds, and occasionally chaotic. Girlfriends glared at me (and one formidable woman literally pushed me), rejected applicants would demand feedback and one man took things so far that I quickly learned the importance of having a separate work phone.
Ever since I worked on The Bachelor Australia, however, I haven't been able to watch a full episode since
What goes on behind the scenes is not just a little manufactured, it's a full-blown, carefully orchestrated machine - which is far less romantic, but, frankly, far more fascinating
I loved it and became weirdly competitive about it. Though I wanted to find the next Bachelor - and good lord did I give it a go - I didn't succeed, though I must have done enough right because they offered me the role of date producer.
At the time, it felt like I'd won the lottery. In hindsight, it was the beginning of the end of my love affair with reality television.
Creating the dates was, on the surface, a dream job. Start with something relatively simple, like a romantic horse ride along the beach. Within minutes, you’d be told to ‘go bigger.’ And bigger we went, because this was a dating show built on every girl’s fantasy.
That horse ride would quickly evolve into a private jet trip, where camels would be waiting on arrival to ride along the beach to a perfectly styled fireside, complete with marshmallows, a musician softly playing and more candles and roses than any normal human would ever encounter in one place.
One time, I built an entire carnival from scratch in a polo field. A Ferris wheel, a petting zoo, even a fortune teller - all dropped into the middle of nowhere, so it looked like this magical, once-in-a-lifetime experience created just for them.
It was ridiculously extravagant and incredibly effective at drumming up the perfect amount of romance. But somewhere between the camels and candlelight, I realized something that completely shifted how I saw the show.
The dates weren't actually the point.
The spectacle was just the set-up. The real work happened back at the mansion, in the long, unstructured stretches between filming... of which there were a lot.
If you want to manufacture emotion, you need three things: boredom, isolation and a group of women with absolutely nothing to do but think about the same man.
We had all three in abundance.
The women had no phones or social media to keep them entertained and were completely shut out from the outside world. All they had was each other, some old magazines and books that had already been read cover to cover and a well-stocked kitchen.
Boredom, it turns out, is extremely caloric.
With days of downtime between shoots, the girls started stress-baking on an industrial scale - and eating it. The weight crept on quickly, and an emergency meeting was held. Shortly after, a full gym setup arrived.
While the women were in the mansion, the Bachelor was holed up in his own private pad, living with a producer whose job was essentially to babysit him, making sure he didn’t sneak out, didn’t contact any ghosts of girlfriends past and stayed completely off the grid.
That left him with only one outlet for all that pent-up energy: the private gym.
He was a gym buff to begin with. Within a week of his isolation, he had taken it so far that he was starting to look like an actual beefcake - and not in a good way.
And so, another emergency meeting was held. Could he maybe... ease up on the weights? The Bachelor sheepishly agreed.
Meanwhile, back at the mansion, a new problem was brewing.
The spectacle was just the set-up. The real work happened back at the mansion, in the long, unstructured stretches between filming... of which there were a lot
Creating the dates would begin with something relatively simple, but within minutes, you'd be told to 'go bigger.' That horse ride would quickly evolve into a private jet trip, where camels would be waiting on arrival
The girls had gotten into fake tans and statement lashes. Rose ceremonies, with film-set grade lighting rigs, were notoriously unforgiving, making the orange self-tans practically luminous on camera.
So, another quiet word was had. Lashes: pulled back. Tans: henceforth provided by a professional spray tan artist weekly, for what production diplomatically called ‘a more natural glow.’
Once you've managed a group of bored, isolated women through a fake-tan intervention, you start to understand the real machinery of this show.
Cut off from everyone they knew, with nothing to distract them, all they had to fixate on was the man they were all there for.
Feelings that would normally take months to build accelerated at an alarming rate. They dissected every glance, every conversation, every interaction they had with the Bachelor.
When someone returned from a date, the atmosphere in the house shifted. It was almost like a walk of shame, with all eyes on them and the inevitable question that cut through the room: 'Did you kiss him?'
Because a kiss wasn't just a kiss. It was competition and felt like betrayal - even though they all got the memo that they would all be dating him.
And we, as producers, knew exactly how to use that to our advantage.
Producers would spend hours with contestants, build genuine trust and then exploit it. They knew which buttons to press, which rivalries to stoke, which insecurities to poke at until something cracked open on camera.
When the tears came, there was a quiet, almost imperceptible ripple of satisfaction through the crew.
Because tears mean great television. On rose ceremony nights, there would sometimes be an audible cheer in the control room when someone broke down on screen.
The Bachelor, for his part, would sit with a producer ahead of the rose ceremonies to go through contestants: who was causing drama, good for the story or had to stay regardless of whether he was into her. If there was a 'villain' delivering great television, a quiet word would be had to make sure she survived another week, even if he couldn't stand her.
Then there was the exhaustion factor.
Rose ceremonies could stretch until four or five in the morning, with contestants running on no sleep and pure adrenaline. Tired people cry more easily, fight more readily and say things they'd never say on a full night's sleep.
On rose ceremony nights, there would sometimes be an audible cheer in the control room when someone broke down on screen
We were told not to form friendships with contestants, but I became genuinely close with some of the women, especially when I was a house producer. (Pictured: Jana Hocking, second from right, with two contests, both on left, of The Bachelor Australia franchise)
They also fall in love - or something that feels a lot like it - much faster.
The emotional stakes, though, were very real. These weren't casual feelings. They had been amplified through isolation, fast-tracked by outrageously romantic dates and turbo-charged by producer encouragement to 'tell him how you feel, don't hold back.'
There was one contestant who fell so deeply that, when it became clear she wouldn't be receiving a rose, production made the decision to have a psychologist on standby. The moment she was eliminated, she was quietly taken into another room to process what had happened.
Meanwhile, as producers, our job was to make great TV, not play favorites or have an empathetic point of view. We were told not to form friendships with contestants, and that there was to be absolutely no flirting with the Bachelor(which was tough, considering the man knew how to charmthe pants off a hat stand).
I, however, became genuinely close with some of the women, especially when I was a house producer, staying with them when we weren't filming. I did such a bad job of keeping the girls at arm's length that years later,I was invited to the Bachelor and his lucky lady's wedding in Italy. We're still friends to this day.
But one moment that really stayed with me was when we got down to the final two.
By that point, everyone behind the scenes already knew who he was going to pick. The decision had been made long before the final rose ceremony. In truth, he’d chosen her on the very first night.
Speaking to other Bachelor producers, that seemed to be a fairly consistent theme. What played out on screen was, in many ways, a continuation of a story that had already reached its conclusion.
I was sent to supervise one of the final overnight dates on a boat with the runner-up. My role was to make sure things didn't cross a certain line (sex was strictly off the table for our season).
When I arrived, the Bachelor and the soon-to-be-eliminated contestant were below deck. I went down, expecting to find them chatting, maybe sipping champagne.
They were very much not chatting. They were completely lost in the moment,I had to interrupt before things went any further.
I suddenly became very aware of how bizarre my job was. There I was, effectively playing chaperone, while knowing that he'd been openly talking about how strong his feelings were for the other woman.
It created this strange tension, even though technically he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was simply playing his role in the story.
Safe to say,I only lasted one season.
Because the truth is, to do that job well, you have to see emotion as content, not as something to protect. I couldn't quite do that. My damn empathy got in the way, which, in that environment, makes you surprisingly bad at your job.
Now, when I see those perfectly lit ceremonies, over-the-top love confessions and the Bachelor's on-screen torment about who to send home,the magic is gone.
Because I've come to realize there was never really magic there to begin with.