Butterflies Womack (Bachelor 11 After the Final Rose)

I wasn’t going to write anything about the After the Final Rose show, but between plates of turkey and mashed potatoes I’ve kept thinking about those darned butterflies. No, it’s not in a “I still think of you every day, Deanna” kind of way or even in an “I miss you more than you’ll ever know” fashion. It’s more like Brad Womack and I have a totally different understanding of the life cycle of the butterfly. When I was a child, my first grade teacher spent all this time walking us through the life cycle. There’s the egg, the caterpillar (larval), the cocoon, then finally the butterfly. If butterflies in the stomach are going to be your metaphor for love, then love is something that happens in well-defined stages.

I don’t blame Brad for this, lots of people use the “feeling butterflies” cliché as a way to suggest that the romantic process is somehow beyond analysis and thus not a matter of choice. Still, it strikes me that a careful analysis of the butterfly metaphor would suggest that real love grows, changes, and develops more or less gradually but in well-defined stages, before it transforms into that colorful-fluttery thing that glides through the air. By the way, the life cycle of a Monarch butterfly is six to eight weeks, roughly the same as the Bachelor.

Of course, the show isn’t premised on the metamorphosis of the butterfly. One reason, most Bachelor couples wind up as moths instead of butterflies (I’m not even sure I want to talk about whatever happened between Mary Delgado and Byron Velvick after the show) appears to be this notion that one can “pick” the right woman off the car lot of love after half a dozen test drives. Most of us know that the measure of a car we actually buy is not how it drives off the lot, but how you like it after it becomes your “used” car, (not in the Hillary Reisinger sense though).

The second image that haunts me is that of Deanna Pappas’s father sitting in some hotel room in California as he waited for the final ring ceremony. Yes, obviously it’s a tv show, but how creepy was Brad’s response? “I can look you straight in the eye and tell you that I’m heartbroken too.”

Brad, feel free to change your mind, but given that circumstance how did you even think to tell America that they should feel sorry for you too. Yes, the production people for the show can manipulate the participants into doing and saying things in front of the cameras, but I’ve never heard of any instance where they tricked anyone into flying a parent out for a proposal. Why didn’t Brad just acknowledge the pain his indecision caused and apologize profusely? You think maybe he could have just admitted being an idiot to Deanna’s dad?

Instead, Brad chose the Butterfly defense. The guy is almost thirty five years old. What the heck was he feeling or not feeling up to that point? Brad was so inept at damage control that Jenni Croft came off as the smartest person on the After the Final Rose. What were the odds of that? I know some of that was sympathy over the death of her Grandmother, and how do Jenni’s grandmother’s warnings to the Bachelor look now? Still, Jenni got to show solidarity with Deanna, asked the logical question about just dating instead of proposing, and got to wish Brad a happy life to boot. In the meantime, she’s back with her original boyfriend. Mr. Butterflies in the meantime sat there blathering about “fairness” and having taken the high road.

There is a school of thought that the ladies needed to make Brad chase them. Looking back, the edit did feel like all the women were throwing themselves and their feelings in front of Brad as he prepared to run over them, back up, ask them “if they’re all right” and tell them “how much he cares about them”, then run over them all over again. It’s possible and that strategy did appear to work for Tessa Horst in the last installment. They were noticeably ahead of him in the romantic rhetoric race. Jenni had been careful until the last chance date, then broke out the journal. Deanna had said “You’re what I want and this is what your life would be with me.”

In the meantime, Brad was answering “Wow, that’s great. I’m so excited.”

In fact, I have a feeling that a tivo of the season would include about seventy instances of Brad talking about how excited he was. Mmmmm! Oh well, I’m still confused about the distinction between thinking about someone every day and feeling butterflies. Brad did mention that whenever he was with one lady he tended to think about the other one. Apparently, that was the romantic equivalent of dividing by zero. Anyone have thoughts about who the zero was?

Oddly, the guy who didn’t like feeling “judged” by Bettina Bell’s parents, wound up getting judged by most of Bachelor America. In the meantime, Deanna Pappas hasn’t ruled out the possibility of being the Bachelorette next summer. Will they bring Brad Womack back the way they brought Mary Delgado back? On second thought, maybe that’s not such a good idea.

Jenn Shefft's take



Sirlinksalot bachelor stories

Other Chancelucky Bachelor reviews

other Chancelucky reviews

chancelucky