Will You Accept This Rose?

An open letter to Jake Pavelka, the newest Bachelor, about his final rose decision and the online activity surrounding it.

Dear Jake, I hope you’re happy. Your season of The Bachelor: On The Wings of Love has ended and you’ve picked the woman that four different ladies on the show warned you was only there for fame: Vienna.

I won’t feign surprise. I knew this was coming. Insider information has been leaked for months about how you fell for Vienna. Even respected gossip sites (i.e. Reality TV Magazine) reported that you liked Vienna so much you took Beyonce’s advice and “put a ring on it.”

But don’t feel bad, I can’t remember one season when the audience wholeheartedly believed that the star made the right choice.

I’ve been a fan of The Bachelor since it began in 2002 when Alex Michel, the successful Stanford grad, dated 25 different women. At the end of the season, Alex announced that Amanda Marsh was “the one”, much to the audience’s chagrin. While he was trying to figure out who would get a rose each week, I was trying to talk about the show with my sisters and my roommates, but they weren’t watching.

When the first season ended, I stopped tuning in because, beyond the tales of love and treachery, what I really wanted was a group of people to connect with about the show. But after discovering the amazing network of fans scrutinizing and LOLing about all the drama via Twitter, Facebook, blogs and message boards, I’ve recently revived my love of The Bachelor franchise.

Every Monday night, I’m live-tweeting the event with a dedicated posse of Bachelor fanatics. I read the Entertainment Weekly recap column (including the hilarious and sometimes harsh comments) on Tuesday morning, as well as reports on RealitySteve.com, the oddly accurate Bachelor psychic who somehow never gets his predictions wrong.  While I prefer the snarkier blogs about the show (the EW.com column written by Kristen Baldwin is gold), plenty of other options exist for fans to get their fill of Bachelor recaps and reviews - more than 110,000 blogs to be exact. Your show has really “taken off”, Jake.

This kind of network was exactly what I was looking for when I was an awkward high school senior watching your predecessor Alex figure out who got the “final rose.” It feels like the proliferation of easy-to-join, easy-to-use social media platforms and applications has magically opened up to the pop culture world, showing us how awesome it is to be “in the know”.

So did you feel the pressure, Jake? We were all tweeting and posting about what we thought was coming next and you didn’t fail to entertain us. In fact, even though only one couple has gotten married in the 18 seasons of The Bachelor and Bachelorette, we all keep tuning in because we want the star to be happy in the end. And now we have a robust network of people to talk about it with – even if we think they picked the wrong girl!

I hope it works out for you guys, I truly do. But until I see the previews for your fairytale nuptials, I will remain skeptical. I hope you understand.

Yours, Meghan.**

** For those of you not living in my crazy Bachelor world, Jake Pavelka is the most recent star of ABC’s franchise “The Bachelor”. On Monday, March 1, 2010, his season, aptly named “On the Wings of Love” since he’s a commercial airline pilot, came to a conclusion. Vienna, his new bride to be, was chosen over Tenley, the chipper divorcee. Vienna was the cause for much drama on the show, leading viewers to dislike her and hope she wasn’t the last one standing.