A Twisted Reality: The concept of “The Bachelor” is strange and messed up yet the show is so addicting to watch

Watching 32 women walk out of a limo doing different acts such as riding a boat or showing up in a truck full of Christmas trees to impress this season’s Bachelor — Joey Graziadei — was certainly confusing at first.

I’ve never been a fan of reality TV, yet I finished all 11 hour-and-a-half episodes.

The concept of the bachelor is strange and messed up yet is so addicting to watch to see how everyone handles dating the same guy.

The social media rave over Maria Georgas — one of the women in “The Bachelor” —  is what originally caught my eye because of her fiery personality and how much the fans loved her. Though the concept of dating over 30 women at once is strange, this season was binge worthy because of how thirsty the girls can get over Joey.

Yes, Joey is a conventionally attractive man, but to me nothing about him was that special. He seems average so I did not understand why every single woman was fixated and drooling over a plain guy that was rehashing the same compliments to each one of them. He didn’t seem genuine to any of the women until he proposed in the finale, and his interactions seemed very robotic and pre-planned. I couldn’t tell if there were any thoughts behind his eyes.

But despite Joey being ordinary, I found the dynamic of all the women to be much more strange. They are all kissing the same guy but somehow all bonded and supported each other — aside from a few small conflicts. This is somewhat admirable and mature because I don’t think I could handle 32 other women dating the man that I was supposed to date myself.

The most strange thing about the dynamic was that the girls and Joey acted like a family. When Joey was in the room with all of them, the girls praised and surrounded him like he was the center of the universe. They’d even brag about how amazing their dates went (despite being with the same guy). This made no sense to me knowing how jealous I would be in their position.

And yet I couldn’t stop watching this ridiculous dynamic. It was interesting to see how much drama all of these girls could create over a mediocre man and seeing Joey interact with all of the different women treating them all the exact same was very easy to make fun of, which made the show good.

I understand why the women would want to travel the world and have a chance to meet their dream man. But as more and more girls started to get eliminated, I questioned  the actual morality of the show after getting attached to the characters. I saw each and every girl think that they had some sort of extravagant love with Joey and watched them all get attached to a fake life and get most of their hearts broken.

This is a stupid way to date considering 31 of the girls would end up going home, and Joey just gets to have all of them while the rest of the girls sit and question their worth wondering if Joey liked them. I’m not surprised that the girls fought.

Despite all of these very strange parts of “The Bachelor,” I was surprised by how invested I got into all of the girls’ lives and the show itself. It’d be a lie if I said I wasn’t entertained watching Maria and Sydney’s drama. Maria was my favorite character throughout the whole show, and she made it the most interesting because she wasn’t afraid to be herself and it changed everyone in the house by speaking up when she thought something was wrong.

Maybe reality TV is a waste of time, but there’s no denying that this season is an addicting binge watch.