Kailynne, 24, Digital Marketing
Eye Color: Brown
If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?
A dolphin, because I believe they represent sensuality.
If you could have dinner with anyone from history, alive or dead, who would it be?
My dad! He’s not dead, but I just have so much respect for him and we both like all the same kinds of food, which is crazy!
Lauren, 25, Student
Height: 5’6
Favorite food: Chocolate anything!
What’s your biggest fear?
Shag carpet. (Lauren has a nightmare that comes to her often. She is in her grandmother’s home, standing in the living room in her bare feet. The tendrils of the tan rug begin to grow, twisting themselves around her toes and gradually up her ankles, rendering her immobile. So perhaps the fear isn’t the rug at all, but her own inability to move forward in a meaningful way. When Lauren’s aunt went behind her back and applied for her to be on reality television, Lauren thought to herself, it’s not real. But what could feel less real than today, she thought, or the day before, when at the grocery store the same woman asked her if she’d like a sample of natural apple-smoked smoked sausage three times, one for each time she walked by, having forgotten something in an earlier aisle. Each time she passed the sample woman forgot she had seen her before at all, and gestured at her with a toothpick and brand new politeness each time.)
Tara, 30, Public Relations Consultant
Favorite color: Definitely red!
What are you looking for in a relationship?
Commitment. I’m looking for marriage material! (Tara repeats this to herself as she walks to the restroom on the opposite end of her office, marriage material. A material, but what is the material? Is it something appealing like lace, or fly paper, or is it some undiscovered element that is heavier than any metal, enough to weigh a person next to her for life. Even if that weight yields to discomfort, all the better, because she seeks to make herself a comfort for that one person: soft hair, soft legs, soft smile, everything like a pillow.)
What’s your guilty pleasure?
I LOVE kids’ cereal. Bring on the fruity pebbles!
Mackenzie, 28, Small Business Owner
Favorite Movie: Something’s Gotta Give
What’s the worst first date you’ve ever been on?
I went on a date with this guy who owned horses and so we went horseback riding and while I was up on his favorite brown and white horse I felt a little lump between her shoulder blades. It turned out she had terminal cancer. We dated for 4 and a half years and I’m not allowed to go to his church anymore!
Katie F, 22, Kindergarten Teacher
Favorite Book: The Bible
Most embarrassing moment: When I was 17 I was reported missing from a Disney Cruise for almost 24 hours!
Lexi, 29, Jewelry Designer
Height: 5’8
What’s your greatest fear?
Spiders, ew!
If you were a fruit or a vegetable, what would you be and why?
A banana, because it’s a long fruit and I was the longest baby ever recorded to be born in a Virginia hospital!
(Poor Lexi knew in her heart, and we all knew, that she wouldn’t make it past the first episode. When the bachelor introduced himself to her with a little hammy smile and a hand quickly extended, his eyeballs already wobbling towards the limousine from which the next woman would emerge, the desperation kicked in. Once in the mansion, Lexi began to take advantage of the free champagne and attempted to mold a friendship with the contestant who seemed the most likely to succeed, but as they spoke in the hot tub, the beautiful woman was cold to her. As a last resort, in the confession booth, Lexi tearfully and falsely admitted that she had a boyfriend back home, although it will be several months before she sees that that footage didn’t make it in either.)
Madison, 28, Bartender
What’s your secret talent?
I’m really good at pretending I’m sick!
Do you have any tattoos?
A butterfly on my left calf.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
I see myself married with my first kid, and she’s a girl, and she looks just like me, and she likes all the same things as me, and we read each other’s thoughts like that, because we’re so much the same. And I’m also a professional singer-songwriter and I have a big house with one of those very deep bathtubs.
Katie B, 25, Nurse
Favorite Color: Pink, or orange.
What do you bring to the table in a relationship?
I’m not a boring person, but a history of relationships within which I have been made to feel embarrassed have led me to withhold most of my less mainstream interests, my political beliefs, and the small day-to-day compulsions that make me most human: needing to use the same stall in the bathroom at work, taking the longer route home from work in order not to pass any graveyards, not going to sleep without rubbing my feet with lotion and pulling on a pair of plush socks.
In this way, I am vague enough for our bachelor to project the woman that he wants upon and hollow enough for the viewers to see themselves within me.
Year after year, you will see some version of myself go far, and although the writers and editors will pull all the stops to make me the archetypal perfect-future-wife, an indissoluble layer of sheen will defy this. My confessions of love sound like I am leading into a joke, but not finishing it. I force my eyes to widen into big plastic plates when they display for the final contestants potential engagement rings tucked into a velvet-lined box. By the end of the season, I am ridiculed, even detested.
Despite this, the viewer applauds when the man kisses me in the helicopter. The camera pans away from my face, out the thick window and to a green island below that I lack both the time and enthusiasm to discover.