COMMENT:
Farewell, then, The Bachelorette. The long-running dating show – experts claim it began in approximately 500BC, others date it to pre-human times in the swamps of Eurasia – concluded on Monday night with happiness for Hottie Lily and Bachelor Richie. Loud violins burst into the room, quiet pianos whispered sweet nothings; reader, I cried, as surely as the watching nation wept, too, as we witnessed love in the time of The Plague.
It was actually really beautiful. Good on them. Lily and Richie always did look right for each other. She liked him from the get-go, or at least from the moment he opened his mouth and a deep, dark voice rolled out from the ocean floor. God, that guy has a good voice. He should be on breakfast radio. In real life, Radio Hauraki morning hosts Jeremy Wells and Matt Heath speak in quite light, rather lispy little voices, but I've sat in the studio with them and been thrilled at how their tone and their timbre sounds so rich as soon as they talk into a microphone. Anyway, Bachelor Richie sounds like that all the time.
But it was also the things he said. A few weeks ago he came out with a speech straight from the heart. Richie said, "I want to meet someone and spend the next 60 years with them, have kids, live in a beautiful house – the whole package." Kin oath, mate. Oath.
He gave her a ring from Pascoes right at the end. He kind of ruined things actually, and said something really lame. "It's a token of the next stage we're going to take together," he droned. But Lily has spent the entire show being swept off her feet and jumping into the arms of this and that bachelor, and once again wrapped her legs around someone's waist as Richie carried her off into the sunset.
As for Hottie Lesina, she was nowhere to been. The show began with her meeting Bachelor Aaron at Piha, and telling him it was over. She decided she didn't want anyone. This was the way her story ended: not with a bang, but a fizzer. Loveless. Bachelorless. Roseless. What I'm trying to say is that she opted to go into self-isolation.
Heartbreak for Aaron. Heartbreak, too, for Bachelor Jesse, who Lily turned down on Monday night's finale with what seemed a phoney speech: "You've been so kind and so patient and you're a beautiful, beautiful man. It's not really about you. It's about us. And the direction my heart is taking me", etc.
He could and probably should have just told her to go to hell but he took it with dignity. So did poor old Aaron, when Lesina dumped him on the sands of Piha. He looked out to sea. The tide went out on his hopes of happily ever after. It washed away his heart. But he set his jaw, and gave Lesina the kiss that all dumped but classy men bestow: on her forehead. "Thus with a kiss," Romeo said, "I die."
The reunion episode screens on Tuesday night. All the contestants come back, and chat about their journey. Bravo to the lot of them. They put their hearts on the railway track and in every case except Richie's the train did not stop. And so it will be one last sighting of Lily and Lesina, one last parade of the men who pursued them these past few centuries; a watching nation will surely be there to witness the occasion, and bid the hotties and the bachelors a final farewell. Goodbye to reality junk. Goodbye to love.