It's the beginning of the end on The Golden Bachelor
Gerry expressed his love for the three remaining women, even after assuring viewers he was only going to say those words to "one more person in my lifetime."
As we’ve said in pretty much every one of these, there’s simply no way The Golden Bachelor ends well. At this point, tuning in is as excruciating as watching a freight train full of sweet older women—and now their children and children’s children—rush headlong into a brick wall labeled “complete and utter heartbreak.” It sucks. But for what is really the first time this week, one has to wonder who is truly to blame for this situation. It’s easy to point fingers at the franchise’s notoriously exploitative producers—the plug should have been pulled on this whole concept a long time ago—but this week our dear Golden Bachelor Gerry also showed a bit of a nefarious side for the first time. Or maybe he’s just an extremely (extremely!) naive, hopeless romantic who doesn’t have the foresight to imagine even a single consequence to his many wrong actions. In which case he shouldn’t have been cast for this show in the first place, if anyone on the production team cared at all about the ethics of what they’re doing. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
This week, Gerry went on three hotly anticipated/slightly dreaded hometown dates with final three Theresa, Faith, and Leslie. But before embarking on his first date with Theresa in Shrewsbury, NJ (of course Theresa is a Jersey girl), Gerry took a minute to check in with himself. “It’s been so long since I first felt those feelings with my wife, so I’m in uncharted territory,” he said of the fact that he’s pretty clearly falling for all three women. “I only want to say ‘I love you’ to one more person in my lifetime, so I really have to sort my feelings out and do the right thing.” Yes, Gerry! Correct!
Reader, that is not what happens. All three hometown dates go exactly the same. They were so similar, in fact, that it would be somewhat useless to break each of them down separately. Unlike OG Bachelor(ette), where the star of the show has to contend with potentially disapproving parents and siblings, Gerry had the far tougher—and more delicate—task of coming into a multi-generational family and fielding tearful praise from children about how in love their mom seemed and cloying questions from adorable grandchildren about whether or not Gerry would be their new pop pop. He handled each date perfectly, which is to say he didn’t handle the larger task very well at all.
Either moments after the date or as her family looked on in Faith’s case, Gerry told both Faith and Leslie that he loved them. Theresa, being the first of the three, didn’t get an explicit “I love you” to her face, but sure did get an “I’m in love with Theresa” in a confessional immediately after. Gerry was the consummate gentleman and clearly made all three of these women—and more importantly, their families—feel like they were the singular loves of his life and the only one for him. Let’s just say there are a lot of all-caps NOs (some with multiple Os) in this writer’s notes from the episode.
Even host Jesse Palmer raises an eyebrow—literally—as all three women tell him about Gerry’s confession of love ahead of the rose ceremony. “Now I’m just realizing I don’t know how I can reconcile the strong feelings I have for each of these three women. I’m very confused,” says Gerry before walking into the room with the cadence of a man attending his own funeral. (Side note: you’re just now realizing?!) “Tonight I’m sure will be the most painful out of all the rose ceremonies I’ve been in,” he continues, with a note of solipsism we haven’t previously heard from him. “I have to remind myself that this is my journey.”
But when push comes to shove, he can’t do it. Leslie gets a rose (probably because she was the last date and therefore the freshest in his mind, if we’re being honest) but Gerry walks out of the room before giving out the other. Just days after convincing the remaining two women’s families that he might be a part of their life “for the rest of his time left on Earth,” he simply can’t cut one of them loose. Either these four people need to read up on ethical non-monogamy stat, or someone’s headed for the blindside of their life—and their family’s lives—next episode.