Oh my God, I am always looking for hidden behind-the-scenes gems about my favorite show–The Bachelor, and I love finding good writers, because a good writer like Penny Farthing, Amy Kaufman, Lincee Ray (her blog I Hate Green Beans is hilarious!) and now this woman former Bachelor contestant Stephanie Simons can articulate and capture the ridiculousness/amazing-ness of this show in a way that I simply can not touch.
Stephanie Simons is quite an accomplished writer in her own right. She was born and raised in San Francisco and is the author of All’s Fair In Love And Wardrobe and Chic-tionary: The Little Book of Fashion Faux-cabulary (Skyhorse Publishing 2014). Her work has appeared in DailyCandy, InStyle and US Weekly.
She was a contestant on Travis Stork’s season of The Bachelor.
So I want to share an excerpt from Stephanie’s article, Everything I Know About Dating I Learned From Getting Rejected On “The Bachelor“, and hopefully you will go to her blog and see the rest of it. She is a brilliant writer! And there are some great nuggets of intel in here.
“Being eliminated from “The Bachelor” is life-changing in a “What the hell was I thinking?” kind of way. No matter what I accomplish in life, it will always follow me around (every guy who Googles me before a date is bound to discover my awful contestant photo that lives on in infamy). I pretty much just have to own it, the same way Channing Tatum owns his stripperdom. So, yes, I was rejected on national television and these are the 6 single girl lessons I’ve gleaned from the experience so you don’t have to:
1. You have the power to create your own happy ending.
Reality TV producers brilliantly manipulate every possible situation for a preferred outcome. The trick is to do the same with your own life.
My Bachelor season, starring Travis Stork MD, was filmed in a mansion in the French countryside and — horror of horrors — half of the girls were sent home the first night for dramatic effect. By “sent home” I mean herded like cattle onto a bus at 4 a.m., given the opportunity to speak with a psychologist, and shuttled to the airport. We had just survived a 12-hour plane ride and were expected to turn around and endure it all over again, before even having the chance to adjust to the time difference.
On a scale of 1 to House Of Pain, this was off the charts.
Travis — a doctor, mind you — had implied that I’d thrown myself down a flight of stairs and faked an injury to get some one-on-one time with him. In actuality, the mansion was practically booby trapped with moss and cobble stones and I’d slipped down some outdoor stairs. My ankle immediately swelled like an eggplant and I received no ice or medical assistance on set. Instead, the producers milked every minute of it, propping me up by a fire place and directing me to ask Travis to examine my stems. People at home were left to believe I was a cunning klutz. (The biggest and most horrific lesson I took away from being on the show is that people will always believe what they want to believe.)
I’d also seen a producer emerge from a room holding a clipboard that had pictures of our faces with big red Xs through them. Being more astute (translation: more sober) than the average contestant, I endured a 3-hour elimination ceremony already knowing my fate. I know, I know, why didn’t I walk out? It’s one of the greatest quandaries of our time. All I can say is that in the presence of extra-large cameras on cranes (BTW, they are impossible to ignore) some of us just stand there stupefied, and can’t function.”
I love the reference to the story of her allegedly “throwing herself down a flight of stairs” for love! Ha ha ha! That is what one of our favorite Bachelor contestant hot messes, Tierra LiCausi, did on Sean Lowe’s season! There have been a lot of ambulance rides to the ER on this show!
I don’t want to copy the whole thing so go to her website in the link I posted above and read the rest of this!!!