Sean #5 and #6: Where There's Smoke, Expect Cookies

Do you realize that we live in a day and age when you can buy a product called "cookie butter"? It looks like this:

This is not butter FOR cookies. It's butter MADE OUT OF cookies. (And it's not just at TJ's. You can find Biscoff butter at the plain old grocery store.) Butter made out of cookies? Who's questioning Santa now, huh? But that's not all. Get yourself some of these:

Now spread cookie butter ON the cookies and make little sandwiches from heaven. Cookies filled with richer and creamier cookies. In a world where things like this are possible, what's to keep us from thinking we can ALL have everything we want? Why shouldn't we have a Monday-Tuesday double-header of The Bachelor? And what's to keep a healthy young guy, for example, from thinking that he should be able to exert no effort of his own, be offered a smorgasbord of beauties, and choose the one he's most attracted to without undesirable consequences? I mean, he wants it, right? That should be enough. 

When you can get cookies filled with cookies, it's completely reasonable for a guy like Sean to think that the hot chick who's magnetically into him must also be ideal, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Cookies filled with cookies shouldn't be possible, but there they are. Girls at the center of trouble and drama who aren't trouble and drama themselves shouldn't be possible either, but...golly. Why not?

So let's get to the main course as quickly as possible and dispense with all the empty-calorie solo dates from both shows at once:

• Wedding-Dress Lindsey, helicopter ride, cold picnic on a windswept mountain eating cold food, snuggle by the fire, awkward conspicuous private public dancing, blah, blah, done. Lindsey won't be around long.
• Snow-Bunny Catherine has a happy energy about her. Snowday play, carriage ride, ice castle snuggle. I like her very un-bachelorette-like knee-length skirt and tights and sweater. Classy. She may not be around long, either.
• Desiree ("Bangs"), symbolic rappelling ("sometimes you just have to step out over the edge"), picnic, tree-climbing, humble-beginnings-trailer-park conversation. Des seems to have an unusually level head for this whole business.
• Date-and-a-half with Tierra and some other girl. Yeah, Tierra coming out on top of that one was a foregone conclusion. I would've been a little more interested if Jackie had seen at least ONE Western movie in her life and whipped Tierra's horse so that it bolted away with her screaming and hanging on for dear life. But even at that, no two-on-one date is ever going to top Allie leaving Casey, with his "this'll win her over" tattoo still raw on his wrist, alone on a glacier in Iceland as the helicopter lifted her away with the wrestler who ended up fleeing through the bushes. Unmatched television. That scene was what got my husband hooked.

And so we come to Tierra. To quote Lesley, "We have a Tierr-ist on our hands!" This is where things get crazy. Or as I like to put it, "worth watching." One of the girls said she could teach a master class on manipulation, and she's right. Shall we count the red flags? 

1. Intruding on a group date to which she was not invited because heaven forbid her target's attention should drift from her for any prolonged stretch of time. (And intruding on the evening part, of course, where she can pull Sean away in the dark. Didn't catch her demanding her chance to chug warm hairy goat milk.) Note: Someone who demands your attention at the expense of others is a bad bet for being thoughtful of you in the future.
2. Declaring her reason to be "I have to do what's right for me." And then afterward saying "getting that all out felt better." Of course this whole exercise revolves around what you want and what you feel, darlin'. Of course it does. Note: Someone who treats her feelings as reality is going to make real reality a living hell.
3. Saying the reason she's so intense is because she had a long relationship with an addict. Note: Stable people do not voluntarily attach themselves to addicts.
4. Walking off to sit pointedly alone by the fire during the cocktail party. Note: People who do conspicuous things cannot have their needs met by normal interaction. (And girls, if she was teaching you a master class, you failed the test. Following her and engaging with her not only starts a battle, but it places it on her turf and lets her play the victim. Duh. Sit and laugh and let her stew over there as long as she wants. Eventually she'll have to cause her scene on your terms.)
5. Frequent use of "deserve." (In fairness, Sean may not be hearing this as often as we are.) Note: Someone who believes herself entitled will never be happy. Anything that does work out, well, you were entitled to it anyway; anything that doesn't means you were robbed.
6. Getting colder than anyone else when placed in icy water. Note: Disproportionate reaction to the elements suggests a naturally cold core.

Sean, it seems, has enough of a nose to detect a whiff of smoke swirling around Tierra. He's just really bad at identifying the source. He thinks, in fact, that what he's smelling is actually cookies. Being made into butter.

Men, as a class, have ever been stupid about how to identify a mate. "Love is blind" is a cliche for a reason, right? (And not just for men, you know darn well.) For centuries, the main male requirement was that nobody else had laid hands on his chosen woman first. Other requirements were just decorations hung on the first: all the clothes, the courtship rituals, the social constraints. The standard for virtue was set so high that a woman's reputation was more valuable than her dowry. Roll back to Sunday night and then ninety years before that and we get Downton Abbey with Lord Grantham bursting in on a ladies' luncheon because he just learned his wife and daughters are eating food prepared by a former prostitute. And you know what they were eating?  Not cookie butter. No sir. Salmon mousse. And they liked it. (I ate salmon loaf as a child. Think meat loaf made with canned salmon instead of ground beef. I can only imagine that salmon mousse goes down a little smoother but no more willingly.) Those people didn't smell smoke and think it was cookie butter. If they smelled smoke they knew it meant fire. Bad women. Inedible kidney pie.

Fast-forward back to Sean. He tells Chris Harrison (who has some stories to tell, be sure) that he's frustrated that there are women there who only seem to want to talk about other women (bafflingly, Tierra is somehow excluded from that classification), but then he tells the women he's annoyed that they're being vague. His burning question when Lesley (?) or maybe Desiree (?) tries to warn him about Troublierra? "Does this have anything to do with me?"

Oh, dear. Now we understand. Why Sean Is Single. According to his logic about Tierra, a guy who holds up liquor stores but doesn't steal from you is fine. So is a woman who can't stand children in restaurants but says she can't wait to have her own. Remember he already told Tierra that he didn't care what anybody said about her. Thus, all that matters is what directly affects Sean. There's no such thing as character. I hate to say it, but it's starting to sound as if they just might be perfect for each other.

Other women, of course, went home instead. Don't underestimate the power of a damsel in distress with a twinkling sideways glance! Sarah with One Arm, poor thing, always seemed to be there to prove open-mindedness. Not on the part of producers, however, who never seemed able to come up with a group date activity that wasn't an excruciating challenge for her. Daniella was a seat filler who never seemed to pick up on that message. And Selma, poor Princess Selma with Standards, who folded her no-kiss standards like an old sweater in, of all places, a cocktail party setting where he was kissing EVERYONE, but who wouldn't fold her comfort standards to jump in a cold lake (did everybody catch her bedazzled earband?), was never a match for Mr. Ruddy and Rugged. Off  you all go, now. And with the numbers reduced to six, time to spend the money to fly everybody someplace warm! Where Sean will surely find True Love. And unlimited cookies filled with cookies, to be sure.