Then she further humiliated her final few suitors by bringing their families onto the show. Most of them got off fairly easily, I suppose, but Bobby Banhart's mother will no doubt be trying to live down her turn on the old stripper pole for some time. Then again maybe dad will install a pole in the living room and mom can get all oiled up, put on a g-string, and entertain the family Saturday nights. The Banharts initially impressed me as a different sort of family than that. I guess it is true that fame changes people.

Once the show was over it occurred to me how similar all of the celebrity-dating shows are. None of the stars ever end up with the winner of the show. I watched the reunion show from Bret Michaels' Rock of Love and remember hearing Jes (the winning contestant) say that she hadn't even seen Bret since he dropped her off at her hotel after the show ended. He said that, according to the rules, he wasn't even supposed to do that, but it was the least he could do for her. She broke up with him on the reunion show because, according to Page Six, "she had taken up with a Chicago clothing designer upon returning home."

I heard rumors that Tila's winner, Bobby said essentially the same thing; that she would never return his calls after the show ended. Tila said that Bobby couldn't deal with her hectic schedule and so he had broken up with her. Two different viewpoints on the same event I suppose. The MTV bio on Bobby says that he "puts his girlfriends first and foremost, but he sometimes has issues trusting them because he's been cheated on more than once." I wonder if this seeming deception on national TV has helped him feel more secure with trusting girls?

So the little light bulb went off in my head and I realized that the producers of these shows had probably built a "cooling off" period into the contract. That way, during the intervening months between the end of taping and the reunion show, everyone's passions could cool down and people could move on with their lives and no one would end up together and there could be a third and fourth season of the show. That way it wouldn't be a deliberate "fix" of the show but the end results would be the same.

The contestants might be hurt when they realize that none of it was ever been real, or that it had only been real for them and not the stars. But oh well, live and learn. an old saying goes "there is a sucker born every minute" and that certainly seems to be the case with these shows. Even so, that same fact will ensure that there will be an endless pool of applicants eager for the abuse that these shows will heap on them.