Say what you will about Bachelor Nation, but we’re a dedicated bunch. Not only do we return, season after season, to endure the emotional abuse of watching beautiful people consistently get engaged to the WRONG PERSON (@Rachel Lindsay), but we do it all year long.
The Bachelor franchise has become the European soccer of the reality TV world. It’s on year-round with seemingly no break and the fans are crazy enough to accept that as a way of life. Also both get really worked up over fantasy leagues. Honestly, there’s serious cross-over potential here.
Almost every Monday night of our year (and in the summer, Mondays and Tuesdays) is spent watching a parade of Instagram models in bedazzled dresses, fitted suits, and flawless veneers parade across our TVs in the name of finding love. But do you know how much time that really is?
We do. And the burden of this information is something we can never unlearn.
Let’s just take the last year, yeah? If you watched Arie’s Season of The Bachelor, Becca’s Season of The Bachelorette, and the latest season of Bachelor in Paradise (assuming you’re watching live and therefore dealing with commercials), you’ve spent at least 68 hours watching Bachelor-related content. This doesn’t even account for the odd extended episode, or After the Final Rose special (because it’s garbage).
Sixty eight hours. Sixty. Eight. Hours. That’s almost three days. Three whole days of your life that you’ve dedicated to watching the tumultuous love lives of beautiful people with questionable motives unfold and implode on national television.
Do you ever wonder what you could have done with that time? What you could have accomplished if those 68 hours hadn’t been whisked away by Chris Harrison and 35 blonde girls named Lauren? Well we have, and went ahead and crunched the numbers to save you from throwing even more time into the bottomless pit that is the Bachelor franchise.
Assuming the average fight from NYC to LA is about six hours, you could have made the trip eleven times. Don’t like flying? Fancy something more scenic? Well you’re in luck, because you could still tackle the road trip, which comes in at just around 43 hours if you drive straight through. That leaves 25 whole hours for you to contemplate, for the millionth time, how the f*ck Rachel picked Bryan over Peter.
This weekend, Eliud Kipchoge broke the world record marathon time in Berlin, coming in at 2:01:39. That man, who has probably never worried if Chris/Chad/Jordan/Trevor/generic-white-guy-name is here for the right reasons, could run about 33 marathons in the time you’ve spent on your couch chugging wine and watching the “most dramatic season yet” fail to live up to the hype.
But you don’t care about marathons. Hell, you probably don’t even care about running. But say you went out right now and tried to bust out a mile—even your untrained legs could probably run about 340 of them in the time that you’ve spent watching SugarBearHair vitamin ambassadors hand out roses to other SugarBearHair vitamin ambassadors.
Remember when you were a kid and your family owned Titanic on VHS, and it came on two tapes because it was just that long? Well instead of watching two near-strangers slow dance to a jarring number of private country music concerts, you could have watched Jack and Rose steam up that old-timey car 20 times. Could have wept watching that old couple cuddle in bed as water rushed into their room 20 times. Could have watched Leonardo DiCaprio’s freezing body sink to the bottom of the Atlantic 20 times.
They couldn’t have shared the door. It’s a buoyance thing. Don’t @ me.
The average commute in NYC is 35.9 minutes one-way (RIP Cynthia Nixon’s dreams of a functional MTA). This seems generous, but let’s go with it. Chris Harrison has stolen 113 commutes from you, in just three seasons of reality television.
It took me about an hour to sit here on a Sunday night, hungover and attempting to do basic math, just to write out this low-key pedantic list of things that I could have accomplished rather than watching The Bachelor for the past year and a half. Well guess what? I could have done this SIXTY-EIGHT TIMES.
68 listicles full of Bachelor franchise deep cuts. 68 odes to the world that Mike Fleiss built. Would that have been a better use of my time? Probably not. But it’s good to know that I’ve got options.
Anyway, catch me on my couch this January, ready to watch an uncomfortable number of virginity puns for Colton’s season of The Bachelor. Some habits die hard, you know?
Images: Giphy (3)
