Culture Diary: The Bachelorette and the Fairy Tale of Clare & Dale

Clare Crawley was announced as the next Bachelorette on March 2, 2020. If you don’t know anything about The Bachelorette, it’s a spin-off of The Bachelor, where an incredibly beautiful woman whittles down a group of dozens of buff, hot men until only one remains and the two get engaged and ride off into the proverbial sunset.

Normally, the shows play off one another, with one of the top contestants from The Bachelor being named as the next Bachelorette, and vice versa. This year being 2020, though, things were different. First, the announcement of Clare as the next Bachelorette caused a mini-shockwave because not only was she not a contestant in the most recent season of The Bachelor (she filmed her season, for which she came in second place, in 2013), she was a staggering 38 years old at the time. Given that most women who appear on the show are in their early to mid-20s, this was a big change, but not an unwelcome one. Many fans of the show, myself included, looked forward to having the lead be more mature, which would seem to indicate she’d have a better idea of what she’s looking for.

And that was what Clare herself declared throughout her brief season, which had many twists and turns before it even officially began. The show had barely begun production, in March, when the pandemic shut everything down. The future of the season was thrown into question. The cast of men, which had been chosen prior to the announcement that Clare was the Bachelorette, had to be re-cast, both due to timing and availability and a scramble to find men who were slightly more age-appropriate (though most of the cast was still younger than Clare, by a significant margin).

When Clare was announced, she said she was looking for a man who could “take off his armor.” This is slightly ironic, given the title of this post, and my own opinion about what went down.

Another first in the Bachelorette’s history: the Bachelorette was so sure of what she was looking for that just two weeks into filming (production resumed at a La Quinta resort in California in July after the cast and crew quarantined), she declared she’d already fallen in love with one of the contestants and wouldn’t be able to continue.