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…