Bachelor Nation has suffered a number of breakups this year — Tayshia Adams and Zac Clark and Katie Thurston and Blake Moynes being the latest to split — continuing a discouraging trend regarding the longevity of The Bachelor franchise relationships. Very few couples have been able to maintain a lasting marriage after getting engaged on the ABC dating show with its pressure-cooker process, and the woman behind one of The Bachelor’s rare success stories has an idea about why that is.
Catherine Giudici Lowe got engaged to Sean Lowe at the end of Season 17 of The Bachelor, and the couple have now been married for seven years and have three children. So she’s very familiar about the struggles that new couples go through after leaving The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, and she told the HollywoodLife podcast that the odds are against them right from the start.
Already, there’s a disadvantage for the couples, right when they even get engaged because the viewers are putting them on a pedestal, and assuming that just because they got engaged, and they fell in love on a TV show, that they will endure normal circumstances as a couple. I think a lot of factors are against them. They don’t come from the same city, they don’t know what a normal routine looks like. They don’t even have each other’s phone numbers, they don’t get to see each other for a potential four months in public. So it’s not easy right from the start.
The Bachelor is nothing if not an intense social experiment. The men and women all live together and are dating the same person without the distractions of the outside world. As Catherine Giudici Lowe pointed out, when falling in love under such unconventional circumstances, the couples can’t expect to have a typical relationship experience after. These couples literally get engaged before they even exchange phone numbers!
Throw in an intensely loyal — and often judgmental — fanbase, and not being able to go public with your relationship until the finale airs, and it’s actually really easy to see how the pressure could get to the couples. So how did Sean Lowe and Catherine Giudici Lowe do it? Catherine gave the credit to her husband for making her his top priority.
When Sean came into our relationship, he knew he was committed to me, he knew he was tied to me. And yeah, it was going to be hard to adjust to having a relationship in front of a lot of cameras, and a lot of people to scrutinize you, but he really tried to show me I was his number one, and at the end of the day, it was him and me.
Hopefully the current and upcoming Bachelor contestants are paying attention! We, as fans, certainly love our drama, but we also love to see a happy ending, especially when we've gotten to watch that couple fall in love. More of that, please!
All eyes are on Michelle Young's journey now, as she approaches the end of her season of The Bachelorette. Fantasy suite dates are on the docket for the December 14 episode, ahead of the three-hour Season 18 finale, which will start at 8 p.m. ET December 21. Stay up to date on the fall finales of all your favorite shows, and then take a peek at what’s coming up the new year with our 2022 TV schedule.
