Bachelorette Jillian Harris, Takes Center Stage

May 18, 2009

jillian_harris We use to say, “spring is here, love is in the air.” Now we can say, “spring is here, can the bachelorette find true love?”

Following the ratings hits of previous years, ABC is expecting a bigger season than ever when this year’s bachelorette, Jillian Harris debuts tonight at 9 PM.

In spite of all good intentions, the bachelor- and bachelorette-contestants don’t have a very good track record when it comes to actually marrying the “love of their life” selected at the end of an 18-week process. One case in point is that of Jen Schefft, the 2006 Bachelorette. The good news: As of this past weekend, she is single no more.

She and fiancé Joe Waterman, were married Friday night at the private dining rooms of Spiaggia (one of the Obamas favorite hometown restaurants) in Chicago.

Schefft, 32, and Waterman, 35, met on a blind date in February 2008. “We really get each other,” she told People magazine, “I guess it’s true things move fast when you meet the right person.”

While these shows have a poor track record as predictors of couples that truly have the right stuff to go the distance, making it down the aisle and beyond, they are thoroughly entertaining and give us some interesting and unique views of what makes attraction work, and why this type of television produced romance so often fails to produce the hoped for result of lasting love.

Virtually all successful relationships go through what Mars Venus Living’s publisher, John Gray, calls “the five stages of dating.”

Those stages, as described fully in John’s best-selling book, Mars and Venus on a Date, are: Attraction, Uncertainty, Exclusivity, Intimacy, and finally, Engagement.

“It’s very common in real life,” John explains, “that couples will skip over stages, moving from attraction, into intimacy, going back into uncertainty and then, if all goes well, move back into exclusivity and eventually engagement. But, in one fashion or another, they will pass through these stages, and navigate them successfully if they are to have a lasting relationship.”

Obviously, as John suggests, it is all but impossible for a serious and lasting relationship to establish itself between the pressures and the staged moments that make up the bulk of these shows.

What does happen here, however, and it makes for engaging programming, is a study in mutual attraction, which in and of itself makes for fascinating TV. This season as the bachelorette moves from thirty possible mates down to a single choice, John will comment each Tuesday, starting May 26^th, on Jillian Harris’s choices and make some predictions as to what may happen next.

“The chemistry of attraction is fascinating to watch,” John says, “and there is no reason to think that this season won’t be filled with as many surprises and cliff-hangers as previous seasons. The human heart can leave us all guessing at times, particularly when the subject is love.”

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Dear Lauren: Yes, Shy Guys Can Get the Girl

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Dear Lauren: “Does College Mean We’ll Break Up?”

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Why Women Won’t Say: “I Love You, Man Boy.”

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