brilliantbreakfast

Ken and David are this year's Fishbach and J.T. -- if J.T. had been a nerd with a stutter before he became Adonis. Ken went way up in my estimation by allying with the neurotic skinny guy and I'm looking forward to this alliance.

The other common thread with EVERYONE who has been on this show is that they have all been about "What I'm looking for", "I want someone to love me" and "What I want my spouse to do/be for ME." No one is about "I want to share the joys of life with someone" or "I want someone I can love". Assuming Lilly and Tom make it, it's because at least one of them (Lilly) is about wanting to do things to make Tom happy. Cortney did the same thing with navigating Jason through his mother's death and reconciliation with his half-siblings. Doug appears to now want to make Jamie happy by giving her a baby. But when it's about me, me, me, what I want, well, of course it's not going to work.

I never wanted kids and neither did my husband. He once said that if I changed my mind, he'd live up to his financial obligations but he did not want to raise a child. To me, especially if you are a woman, thinking a man will change his mind is a fool's game. If you are a man and you want kids, choose a woman who also does. I cannot tell you how many women I know who married men who didn't want children, had a baby anyway (usually their mothers tell them to do it and the mother says "Once he sees the baby he'll love it". All of these women ended up divorced. Lilly should only be talking about kids in the abstract: "I am going to want children; I don't see marriage without children." And Tom is either on board with "sometime" or he's not. This is something you should decide BEFORE you marry. I'd known since I was a child that I didn't want children. When I was young and it wasn't an issue I assumed eventually I would, but once I got married, I never looked back. Oh, and PS -- I am now a 60+ widow and I am financially secure because of that decision.

It was Puerto Rico, I'm sure there were guys waiting right outside the airport ready and waiting. These guys automatically KNOW who's looking to buy, and guys looking to buy always know who the sellers are. My late husband, who was also fond of the Weed With Roots In Hell, could find a hotel's "designated guy" within 20 minutes.

Many years ago, I went on a personal ad date with a guy who was 6'5" tall. I was 4'10". He made it very clear that while I was a nice person, the height difference was preposterous, and I agreed, whereupon we proceeded to have a pleasant dinner and then parted ways. But since he was no longer a "prospect", we were able to speak pretty freely, and I told him about the guy I'd had 2 breakups and reconciliations with because he was never ready to get married. And this very tall man gave me a good piece of advice that I have never forgotten: When a man says he doesn't want to get married, believe him. And the corollary to this is "When a man says he doesn't want children, or isn't sure he wants children, believe him." What I want to know is why on earth these "experts" don't match people based on the very real issues we're seeing here: Blingy Lily and Live On a Bus Tom? Nurturing Lily with I Just Want To Surf Tom? Heather I Don't Like Smoking with Derek Smokes All The Time? Nick the Automaton with Emotional Hairtrigger Sonia? Let's not even get into the dogs. These "experts" are doing this deliberately -- creating these trainwrecks out of people who just want to find someone to spend their lives with -- all for the cameras. It's sick, sick, sick, and every week I hate myself for watching.

Lilly and the bus really hit home for me. Like Lilly, I met this really good-looking guy with whom I was immediately smitten beyond words. When he suggested we move in together, I was living in a decent and safe garden apartment, and he was living in a 4th floor walkup where the roof leaked, and he and his roommate hadn't cleaned ANYTHING for years. The finish was off the inside of the toilet and it was all rusty. It was an old building with one of those kitchens with NO workspace at all, and there were plastic trash bags full of beer bottles that his roommate had left when he moved out. It was $100/month, which was dirt cheap even in 1984. And for a few brief weeks, I thought that I could fix the place up...until I started having panic attacks in the middle of the night because I did not want to live there. We ended up finding a new apartment where we could both commute to our jobs. It didn't seem fake to me that she was going to try to be OK with the bus. Inside of Lilly is a zaftig girl screaming to get out. The minute she hits 30, keeping that juicy little body is going to be next to impossible. It's not her fault, she's just not built to be a bikini girl for more than a few years. She does not seem particularly confident to me, despite being a real estate agent and in sales. I'm guessing she battles her weight constantly. She is so agog at being matched with this good-looking guy that if he asked her to stand on her head and spit wooden nickels, she'd be on her head spitting. The problem is that there is only so long that the things you find charming, or at least tolerable, in a new relationship, start to become not-so-charming once you really start getting into building a life together. In the beginning you can make your peace with messiness, or having no help around the house, or pot smoking, or living in a bus, or whatever Mr. Handsome's particular quirks are. But that doesn't last, and I don't see ANY kind of shared value system between Lilly and Tom to keep them together. As for Nick and Sonia,, Nick keeps talking about how he's quirky, and she talks about how she's quirky, and they probably used these words in the interviews and got matched because of that. But just like Neal and Sam last season, quirky people are not quirky in the same way. One person's quirk might be something like OCD, while another's might be writing fan fiction and going to science fiction conventions. The word "quirky" by itself means nothing, and so we have what at BEST is a painfully introverted guy matched with an extroverted but painfully insecure woman. I could match people better than these so-called "experts" did.

What strikes me about all the people who have participated in this show is that not one of them has said anything about what they hope to give to another person. It's all "What I want', "what I'm looking for", "what I expect to get." Whether it's Jamie and her baby madness, or Ryan R. expecting a wife to move into the basement in his mother's house, or Heather expecting I don't know what -- they are all about me, me, me, me, me. No wonder they haven't been able to find someone to commit to who wants to commit to them. Marriage is work --- hard work. It can be very rewarding work, but it's work. I don't have a sense that anyone who has ever been on this show, with the possible exception of Courtney (who had to guide Jason through losing his mom and that whole second familiy thing) and Doug, who apparently has spent the last two years jumping through hoops for crazy Jamie, has demonstrated ANY ability to want to actually GIVE to another person, or put his/her needs second to the other person. Yes, you do that over a period of time when you date and get to know someone, but when you watch their REASONS for wanting to marry, "being there for someone else" is never part of the equation.

Regarding Derek and smoking: My (now deceased) husband was a smoker. I hated smoking. My mother was a chain smoker and I always hated it. I put up with it with my husband because I was crazy about him. And after we had settled into marriage and the "bloom was off the rose" -- that initial burst of "Everything you do is adorable", it really started to bother me. He was a courteous smoker -- he always tried to keep the smoke away from me -- but it never seemed to be the right time to quit. Derek and Heather are strangers, so they don't have that "new passion" thing that blinds you to your partner's faults. I do think that smoking is a big enough deal that they should really probe this while casting. If they did, and Heather said she didn't mind, then it's on her. That said, I do think that when you get north of 30, the backwards baseball caps really need to go away. Regarding Tom: There's something creepy under the surface about him. I'm getting kind of a Ted Bundy vibe from him. He has great eyes and knows how to use them, but I'm sorry -- a guy living in a bus near the beach is not someone who is eager to find someone to marry. I don't think you can run a show like this for more than one season. Maybe the first time you get people who want to get married. But after that? There is money and that bizarre reality show fame that comes with this...and the possibility of a spinoff, a la "The First Year." I think that is motivating these people more than anyone else (except Nick, who seems as if he stumbled into this show by mistake).