Cassie saved Colton’s ‘Bachelor’ season from total disaster

Our Bachelor appears to have found love. If he hadn’t, the season would’ve been terrible on multiple levels.

2019’s was my first season of Bachelor fandom. I picked it up just in time for the finale of 2018’s Ari-Becca-Lauren season, which was like if someone who’d never tried alcohol before took an entire bottle of Everclear to the face. Ari broke up with a devastated Lauren and gave the series’ final rose to Becca, then reversed course after a few weeks and dumped Becca in jarringly public fashion before falling back into the waiting, eager arms of Lauren.

If 2018’s Bachelor finale was a punch in the mouth, followed by a breath of fresh air, followed by a kick in the heart, followed by a pogo-stick leap up to heaven, then Tuesday night’s 2019 finale was the moment that the people guarding love’s floodgates finally opened them and let the passion flow. There were no great surprises in the last episode. After a season that turned The Bachelor’s usual script on its head, the finale was refreshingly boring.

It didn’t end in a rose ceremony, obviously. Our boy Colton is not engaged, but he does appear to be happily dating Cassie, who was an obvious frontrunner to anyone who watched the season closely from the start. But after Cassie walked off the show in the episode the week before, unable to make the marital commitment Colton had been seeking all along, it was clear Colton would have to attempt a fourth-quarter comeback bid.

He dumped his two remaining suitors, Hannah G. and Tayshia, in the finale’s first part, which aired Monday. He’d told Cassie he thought about her while he was dating them, and the Bachelor producers’ choice to air that line shut down any shot of him going any further with anyone else. If you thought ABC wouldn’t dare end its show end with its star being heartbroken, then Colton and Cassie dating afterward was the sole reasonable outcome.

Leading into this finale, I thought there was a high chance the only conclusion afterward would be that Colton sucks.

Throughout his season, Colton exuded what a generous observer would call an unyielding passion to find love, and what another observer might call toxic entitlement.

Until he decided to push in all his chips on Cassie, Colton had insisted that he wanted the season to end with a(n accepted) marriage proposal. That’s a lot to expect, given that The Bachelor shoots over a roughly two-month period. On the other hand, the people who sign up for the show presumably do so with their eyes open. Given that Colton had been mercilessly dumped toward the end of Becca’s Bachelorette season in 2018, and that he’d made such a public show of his virginity and desire for a deep relationship, the women likely knew what they were in for.

The Bachelor is, in this way, gross. And I’m fine with the argument that the compressed, spotlighted nature of the show should excuse some choices that would be hard to defend in many modern relationships. There can be different expectations from the guy named Jake you met on Bumble and the guy you chose to court on The Bachelor.

Yet Colton seemed to push the boundaries of being a good guy, especially as his season barreled toward the finish. Consider just these last few episodes:

• He expressed displeasure, bordering on resentment, that Cassie’s dad didn’t give his blessing to marry his daughter when Colton asked for it after a few weeks of dating. Mind you, Colton was at that same time requesting the paternal blessing (itself up for debate as a good thing) from the three other fathers of the three other women he was dating.
• After dumping the excellent and kind Hannah G. in the penultimate episode so he could better pursue Cassie, he said: “I hope I’m not giving up a for-sure thing for something that’s impossible.” I’m sure Hannah G. appreciated being labeled “a for-sure thing.”
• He told host Chris Harrison that he thought Cassie was only unsure of their relationship because Colton had been dating other women. When Harrison suggested that maybe Cassie — who knew full well what The Bachelor was — just wasn’t that into him, Colton balked at it.
• Before going to find Cassie at her Portuguese hotel to woo her back, he told the film crew: “I’m not sure if she can be in love with me, but I hope she’s not at peace with her decision, because I’m not.” I get what he’s saying, but wishing emotional distress upon the woman who’d just dumped him didn’t feel like the most loving thing he could have done.

Even for a wounded soldier on love’s battlefield, none of that’s good.

Had Cassie decided she didn’t want to be with Colton and been forced to dump him a second time, it would’ve been downright ugly.

Colton likely would have looked pretty bad, too.

The line between respectfully persistent and creepy would be easier to identify if not for The Bachelor being a distorted fishbowl that turns dating into something it isn’t for 99.9 percent of the human population. According to Cassie, it wasn’t any dissatisfaction with Colton that made her want to walk off the show in the first place, but instead her own desire not to deny him the engagement he’d so clearly wanted. That makes his decision to cut ties with the others and try for her again seem, to me, more appropriate.

We’ll never know how Colton would’ve responded on the show to being turned away by the person he loves a second time. But, at best, the season would have been all about a kind of entitled, immature guy having his heart broken.

At worst, it would’ve boosted some lousy ideas about what healthy dating should look like. It arguably does that anyway, including by making the mockery of male virginity a central plot point. (Colton appears to have lost his to Cassie in the finale, though he never says so outright.) Without Cassie’s open-mindedness, this would’ve been a Hindenburg of a season.

This is a sports website, and I should probably tie this back to sports now.

Colton wasn’t the best quarterback of his own life. But in Cassie, he lucked into a good coach who was able to take him all the way to the Super Bowl. Cassie is Sean McVay, and Colton is Jared Goff. I hope their future together goes better than the Super Bowl did.

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