Sugar & Spice: The Bachelor - On the Wings of Love

If you need to play catch-up with this, the 14th season of The Bachelor because you've been living under a rock, click HERE

Jake Pavelka has chosen Vienna Girardi as his bride-to-be. Much to the groaning of America (Canada included! WOOT WOOT 14 Olympic Gold Medals! -sorry I had to)...he has answered the question to which suits his fancy: sugar or spice.

Sugar: Tenley Molzahn
A former Team Ali cheerleader, I (post-her leaving Jake for Facebook) have become a Team Tenley rooter. As with the last couple of episodes, and looking back to their history, she was my runner up in my list of 'Whom Jake Should Pick.' (Not that I expected him to contact me pre-airdate production and ask my opinion) According to another Bachelor-Bachelorette, Tenley is so sweet she,"farts rainbows!" As if she popped out of my favourite Disney movie Enchanted and jumped onto The Bachelor stage. She even posseses ballet dancer finesse as she whirled around Jake on one of their dates. She wears a permanent smile and is the sunshine on a cloudy day. A definite sweetheart and by far, the sweetest contestant ever to have graced reality tv, she fulfills my sweet tooth, and I too, fell for her -Jake.

Spice: Vienna Girardi
In my opinion, more of a tazmanian devil than Rozlyn (and her 'inappropriate relationship with a staffer' fiasco) Vienna is the epitomy of those girls that you never could get along with in high school. No matter how juvenile it seems, she was able to arouse the tempers and unleash the claws of all the other bachelorettes, except Gia -who became her sidekick through the catfights. Blaming 'brutal honesty' as the source of all the hate-orade, Vienna is the equivalent of half the girls my age that I hate to say represent 2(4) year olds: oblivious, misguided, and simply, immature. Jake himself identified this -immaturity- as a reason for them to 'grow together' but I guess that date jumping off the bridge really cemented their bond. She held together the shaken pilot and he found solice in a steady hand. She is 'naturally sexy,' whatever that means.....*volcano mud-rolling date* and undeniably Jake has returned the passionate fire that she exhibited from the beginning. Her fiery exterior was misunderstood by the other girls, but led to the final rose for Vienna.

In a perfect world, according to the gospel of She:

• Jake would be with Ali* (I still love you Facebook, but you came in the middle of something real- he admitted that she was the FRONTRUNNER)
• Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gossling would love forever and always be re-enacting their kissing scene from The Notebook for the rest of their lives
• Justin would have saved Britney from herself and they would have had their own Mickey Mouse brood
• Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro would live out their marriage 'til death' did them part
• Jon and Kate (Gosselin) would raise their 8 all-through college, through 8 weddings, and who knows how many grandchildren!
• broken hearts would only refer to broken chocolates from Valentine's day.

The reason why we -women- get hooked on shows like this is because:

• all of us have been on that chase for a man's heart, while we wear ours on our sleeve - an honorary badge of hope that 'something could come from nothing'
• we hold our breaths at the end of each episode for our cheer-for girl, always finding that rejection is something universal. Even beauty queens, supermodels, and perfect prime princesses hear No Thanks... once in a while
• women can relate to chasing the unavailable man like waiting for the lavatory sign in the airplane to become vacant
• on shows like this, the seek-and-you-shall-find for love is compressed into weekly bite size portions that are devoid of just the right amount reality to equate our dreamiest of dreams
• we are forced to look at what we have (or don't) and know that if you say No, Thanks that there will be another 25+ women vying for what you have/had.
• we relate to that vulnerable part of ourselves that once let ourselves 'fall' for a 'real connection' that resulted in nothing but a single moment in time -the past.
  
• it can be easier to live vicariously through the exhibition of the sport through reality tv than get your own butt out there in the real world and slay your dragons
• the search for love is an individual journey, that we all must travel alone...to find someone worth pulling over, picking up and going for the long haul.

Things that this season's The Bachelor -on the wings of love- taught me:

1. love is like air....it is everywhere. Someting unseen, but undeniably present, be it for the moment or a glimpse of the future.
2. all is fair in love and war....even if war is between 25 bachelorettes, because selection at every rose ceremony means that if you get a rose, you have an "equal" chance of finding love with X
3. love makes even the most seemingly unconventional, conventional. So much so that it leads to the institution of marriage - a legally and soulfully binding commitment, per se.

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