The Second Thing 2024 Taught Me Was Everybody Wants Love
A Black Eyed Review of Love & The Golden Bachelorette
Keith Haring | Men Holding Heart
A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Here’s an audio reading of this essay.
Because Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner’s televised wedding vows to Theresa Nist didn’t turn out to be the second chance fairytale they’d hoped for, my husband and my kid weren’t as enthralled as I was to watch the first Golden Bachelorette find the man who’d “to have and to hold” her until death do them part. Gerry and Theresa would divorce after three months of marriage. I won’t lie, my family’s heart was unreasonably (and inappropriately, because it wasn’t our business) heartbroken. In an Us Weekly interview, Theresa shared her disappointment and future hopes with readers:
You just think the world wants a love story and they want you to move. You don’t know how you’re going to feel until you’re really faced with that decision. It’s very difficult. I do want to be in love. I do want to be with someone. I think love is for me the most important thing and it’s love of family and to have a partner in life is what I want.
And that’s just it. At the end of the day, most folks just want to fall in love and be with someone who loves them in return. Of course not everyone needs this romcom kind of love. There are plenty of folk who don’t. But even those people want some kind of love. Love, love, love! There’s a reason Hallmark is making a killing on holiday movies centered around every kind of love: millions upon millions want to feel the glow of a real human love connection. In the bleak midwinter, our human hearts need a platonic, familial, romantic, or all-of-the-above love to keep us warm, and Hallmark storylines touch on each type of love: Eros – human heart falls for another beating heart; Philia – a big shot city mouse falls in love with a country honky tonk or woodsy Christmas tree town; Storge – the prodigal returns and the family’s all back together again. Hallmark wants the whole world to know that love really is love.
Like Gerry and Theresa, the Golden Bachelorette, Joan Vassos is a widow who’d already had a storybook kinda love. She and her husband, John, spent 32 years in love before his passing. And when viewers are shown the sepia-tipped photos and blurred home videos of them through the years, collectively we wince. Our hearts flinch in unison. We ache because their love story proves life is not fair. Our hearts virtually murmur to each other, “But they were so beautiful and so in love.” And so, the first night of the show, our hearts were committed. Joan, wearing a nude, bedazzled and gilded gown is the picture of what the words "golden bachelorette" would look like in an encyclopedia. Her highlights are kissed by God, up-lighted by starlight and moonglow. We cheer from our screens, “Bring on the men… Bring on the happy ending.”
But for me, life got busy, and because I was alone in my obsession and there’s only one TV, I only saw the beginning of Joan’s second-chance story. Weeks went by. I didn’t tune in again until the plot had well thickened. Connections were made but I’d disconnected. I wondered if any of these people deserved a love story.
Harris lost and I wasn’t sure if I could cheer on anyone whom I perceived might not feel the loss as much as I did. Which was weird. I mean, it’s not like I hadn’t watched other seasons of the Bachelor Nation franchise and known that most of the bachelors and bachelorettes, golden or otherwise, probably didn’t align with my political leanings. The entire premise is a very binary, hetero, cis-forward deal, yet my family watched and discussed the binary-hetero-cisness mess of it all – and with much glee. But now, I wanted to know whom Joan voted for and whom each of her suitors voted for and I knew that if I knew the truth I might never be able to watch another TV show again. Was I willing to start drawing this line? If love is love, does that also mean love is love for everyone – even some red-blooded, NRA supporting, MAGA undercover operative trying to find love at Bachelor mansion? If he or she found love would I be happy for them?
It’s silly, right? Or is it? I still don’t know, and I’ve spent a dumb amount of time researching and trying to find out: do Black folks (and I mean traditionally liberal Black folks) go to Bachelor Nation? Do they go to Montgomery County in Maryland, a solidly blue county, where Joan has lived for years? And do they go to Sedgwick County in Kansas where Chock (her final rose) lives, and also where Trump only won by a slim 14.5%? And again whom did Joan—and Chock—vote for? And oh my God is love “love is love” and is love just love?
Everybody wants love.