Competition-based dating formats build relationships on evaluation and comparison, which teaches partners to keep watching for someone better rather than to commit. The healthier alternative is choosing a person and then building trust with them — and, as one season demonstrated, being willing to talk openly about therapy.
The format is the problem
The Bachelor is enormously popular, and it is not hard to see why. It plays directly into a set of appealing fantasies about love and desire: to be romanced, to be the object of attention, to be seen as beautiful, to be pursued by someone handsome and successful, to have a spectacular wedding.
Some years ago there was substantial public outrage when one season's lead ended his engagement to the woman he had chosen and became engaged to the runner-up instead. Feeling ran high enough that a state legislator proposed, apparently seriously, barring him from entering the state.
Speaking as a therapist, the surprising thing is not that it happened. The surprising thing is that any of these relationships last at all.
Because this is close to the worst possible way to enter a marriage, or any long-term committed relationship.
Why choosing "the best one" backfires
Put twenty people together and have one person work out which of them is best.
Whatever else that produces, it does not build a foundation for a stable, mutually trusting relationship. It actively encourages the opposite: it trains the lead to remain permanently on the lookout for someone better than the person they are currently with. Reverse the genders and the equally unhelpful version of the show does exactly the same thing.
Once a relationship is built on that footing, the obvious question is how you would ever switch it off. Why, after the beautiful finale, would the habit of comparing simply stop?
Commitment runs on a different mechanism entirely. It works by deciding — and then putting your energy into the person you decided on, rather than into continued evaluation of whether they remain the optimal available choice.
Those two modes are close to incompatible. And the show spends an entire season rehearsing the wrong one.
This is not really about television
It would be easy to treat this as a complaint about a TV show. It is not, because almost nobody's relationship problems come from reality television.
They come from the same mechanism operating in ordinary life, where it is now supplied continuously and free of charge.
Social media offers an unlimited feed of other people's relationships, edited for presentation. Dating apps are structurally a comparison engine — the entire interface is built around the possibility that the next profile might be better. And in a marriage, the comparison usually needs no technology at all: it is the couple at church who seem to have it easier, or the friend whose spouse seems more attentive.
In every case the comparison is between your partner's full unedited reality and someone else's visible surface. It is not a fair contest and your partner cannot win it.
The thing one season got right
In fairness, the format once produced something genuinely useful.
During one season of The Bachelorette, the lead and one of the contestants had an open conversation about therapy — on a first date, on camera. He explained that after his previous relationship ended he had seen a relationship therapist, and said it had helped him a great deal and left him calmer in his own thinking.
She was visibly pleased by this, and added her own experience: after a long relationship ended she had felt there was something she was not getting about herself, so she went to a therapist. She described it as the best decision she made that year, and said it prepared her to understand what she wanted from herself and what had not been working.
Open discussion of mental health does not usually happen on television, let alone reality television. That it happened here mattered.
Two things in it are worth pulling out.
The first is that not everyone who goes to therapy has a mental illness. A large share of the work therapists do is with people who are functioning well and want to understand themselves better before making a significant decision.
The second is that most young adults genuinely do not know what they are looking for in a relationship, and that this is a learnable thing rather than something you are supposed to intuit. A therapist can help someone develop communication tools, prepare realistically for difficulty, and set expectations that will survive contact with an actual person.
What actually predicts lasting
If the competition model is wrong, what is the alternative?
Not intensity. Early intensity is a famously poor predictor of anything, which is precisely what makes the format so watchable and so misleading.
The research on couples points somewhere less cinematic: how conflict is handled, whether repair happens after a rupture, whether partners turn toward each other in small everyday moments, and whether contempt has entered the relationship. Undramatic, unfilmable, and far more predictive.
The encouraging part is that these are skills. They can be learned, and they can be learned before a crisis rather than during one — which is most of what premarital and couples counseling is for.
Our therapists do this work in Orem, Murray, and online across Utah. Start with a free 30-minute consultation: 801.272.3420, text 801.997.8760, or book online.
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