“I’m completely blown away by how romantic you are. You’re incredible.” That kind of treacly, hyperbolic, pseudo-romantic dialogue is expected from contestants on ABC’s unkillable reality competition The Bachelor, but if an otherwise normal person actually said those words out loud to another person during a real, non-televised date, it would be creepy, off-putting, and deeply upsetting. That’s the lesson to be learned from an observant new sketch comedy video on Mashable about the downside of letting The Bachelor unduly affect your romantic life. “If Girlfriends Talked To Their Boyfriends Like Contestants On The Bachelor” focuses on two young couples. The women in these relationships are obviously dedicated Bachelor viewers, and the show has started to change how they talk, think, and behave.
It’s not a good sign that they bring roses and champagne glasses along with them when their respective boyfriends drag them to a doctor’s office. And turning away from someone to give a straight-to-camera confessional (a sample: “It was a small setback, but I still feel like we had a special connection!”) is downright insane, especially when there’s no camera there to record it.
According to Mashable’s Max Knoblauch, The Bachelor is a “strange and very popular” show in which “men named Ben or Brad date about 28 different women named Lauren or Amber until selecting just one to propose to.” Over 20 seasons, certain linguistic tropes have started to sneak into the show, and this video is a way of calling The Bachelor out on a bunch of them at once. Knoblauch cites such phrases as “strong one-on-one connection” and sentences that begin, disingenuously, with the word “honestly.” It’s interesting to note that Mashable and SNL both picked up on one specific Bachelor cliché: “Hey, can I steal you for a sec?”