I’d never watched a season of The Bachelor/Bachelorette until this summer. I heard my coworkers discussing it for years, but felt confident that it was basically a cast of the most vapid, self-involved, fame-hungry, crazy-beautiful people in the United States. Aaaand, after watching Rachel’s season of the Bachelorette, I discovered that I was mostly right. You could see her picking Bryan a mile away, which is approximately how far away you could smell his total bullcorn. Almost everyone was kind of awful and now, with Bachelor in Paradise, we can delve deeper into the psyche of a select few of these wonderful gentlemen and the ladies that could possibly love them.

It took me 3 late nights before I managed to watch all 4 hours of Bachelor in Paradise available this week. OK so lesson #1 when I started watching this show: the episodes are two hours long. WHY, ABC, WHY? That’s too long for normal, human people to watch. That’s the same time commitment as a  movie – EVERY EFFING WEEK. “But you could record and flip through the commercials,” you might say. Yes, I could do that… in theory. In practice, my stupid Playstation Vue won’t fast forward through the vast majority of advertisements on this show. Le sigh.

So filming was interrupted just a couple of days in due to some sort of drunken sexual encounter between two cast members that I won’t go into here because it’s old news now, which caused a huge upheaval and lots of drama, but seems to have left our remaining cast completely ready to continue making their love lives public knowledge. Honestly, short of a hurricane that destroyed the entire southern hemisphere, I’m not sure anything would have deterred these folks from continuing making their love lives public knowledge. Even then, they’d probably set up in someone’s basement in New Jersey and continue filming. They want to be on TV and they want it now.

I know these are real people and not characters on TV. I try to tread lightly because my approval means everything to them, but this show has the biggest bunch of handsome dorks I’ve ever seen in my life. Most of these guys are just completely undateable. They’re annoying (Alex) or douche-y (Iggy) or clearly just commitment-phobic (most of the others). STOP DOING THAT TO YOUR HAIR, ROBBY. On the lady side, some of them are crazy (Jasmine, Lacey), some are obnoxious (Corinne), and the rest fairly nondescript (so far). I don’t know the history on any of them since I never watched any of their seasons, but I don’t think it will take me long to catch up.

My main point is this: I CALL BULLSHIT.  These people are super attractive. There is either something so, so wrong with them or they stay single for the sole purpose of continuing to sip pina coladas on a beach and be “famous.” There is no way on this Earth that all of these people just haven’t found “the one” if they are truly trying to meet a person to marry. Especially if the only criteria for being “the one” is being featured on a television show (which, reminder, is how you all got there). Truthfully, finding someone to be with isn’t that goddamn hard once you decide that’s actually what you want and you’re willing to compromise, be vulnerable, and accept that someone else is an actual human being with flaws. Either these folks are so annoying or damaged that no one else will take them (which I maintain is impossible – there’s someone out there who will deal with a lot for pretty) or they don’t actually want to be in a relationship.

So right now, we have Taylor and Derek. Derek seems like he’s hitching his wagon to the first available lady to secure his rose. I don’t buy it. Jasmine has seemingly no idea that Matt Whocares is now regretting his decision. Kristina has realized about Dean exactly what Rachel did: there is no man behind the curtain. Alex, leave Amanda alone. Is that everyone who is actually doing anything?

OH ALSO, this constant talk about who girls are “giving their rose” to gives me the weirds and the coverage of Carly and Evan’s wedding was too long.

I’m looking forward to continuing to enjoy this slow-motion trainwreck as a distraction from the very real problems happening in the good ol’ US of A right now. So Danielle, take it from here: