Happily Ever After: The Life-Changing Power of a Grateful Heart by Sutter Trista

Author:Sutter, Trista [Sutter, Trista]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780738216669
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2013-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

TO BE(FRIEND) OR NOT TO BE(FRIEND)

“I didn’t come here to make friends.”

If you have ever watched The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, you’ve heard that phrase at least once every season. Some resolute contestants start down the fantasy date-filled path focusing all their energy on the road to a spouse, rather than the road to new friends. As someone who turned thirty during her televised quest for Prince Charming, I get that mind-set—I wanted a husband! The contestants think that if they actively ignore the other participants and focus solely on the man (or woman) of the hour, it will give them a leg up on the competition and they’ll be that much closer to the end of the fairy-tale rainbow.

Maybe. But I say, as with any other life experience, what would it hurt to turn strangers into friends? As Rod McKuen, an American singer-songwriter and poet, has said, “Strangers are just friends waiting to happen.”

Granted, when I first applied for The Bachelor, I wanted some excitement, to escape the rut I was feeling bogged down in, to travel, and perhaps most important, to meet some new friends. I’ve never understood the whole “I didn’t come here to make friends” strategy. Yes, everyone is vying for the same person, but by isolating yourself and being unfriendly, you aren’t showing your love interest that you are more dedicated to finding a partner—you are just showing him or her you are unfriendly and like to be socially isolated. To me, finding love in this (yes, unconventional) way has always been about showing your true colors and hoping that the compatibility pieces fall into place.

Granted, in ancient times, when I appeared on the first season of The Bachelor, all of the contestants, including myself, were naive. Even though we were explicitly told by the producers that we were in competition with one another, we were still just trying to find our footing in an unusual (albeit luxurious) environment. So we made it simple: when we weren’t out with our bachelor, we enjoyed our temporary lavish digs in paradise, had all-hours gab sessions, and whiled away our days by the pool with our fourteen new friends (on the first season, fifteen of us moved into the mansion after the first rose ceremony).

In the most recent seasons, I get that it’s not that simple. Many of the participants come into the process with a one-track mind—they want to stroll off into the sunset with a Neil Lane diamond on their ring finger. They want to be the next Ashley and J.P. or even Ryan and Trista. Since it’s not just them and their potential soul mate going through the courtship process as they would in the real world, this naturally causes a bit of drama. And I’ve never seen a producer fail to give existent drama a little nudge in the even-more-drama direction. After all, it’s the producers’ job to create attention-grabbing television and use anything they can to get America and the world to watch, even if that means encouraging rivalries, as opposed to allegiances, among the competitors.

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