By Lisa Scottoline
You’re not getting older, you’re getting golder.
At least, according to ABC-TV.
I’m talking, of course, about The Golden Bachelor, which is the latest entry in this insanely successful TV series in which people meet and get married after three dates, a large helping of projection, and a scary helicopter ride.
This is yet another description of my second marriage.
Only we never got anywhere near a helicopter.
It just felt that way, pitching and yawing high up in the air, with too much noise.
Ain’t love grand?
Actually, it is, provided that you get it right, and that’s what people are trying to do in these TV shows, to meet a guy or a gal in real time and get married with a ring that somebody bought for them.
Honestly, maybe that’s where I went wrong.
I should’ve married Neil Lane.
If you watch the show, you know that he’s the jeweler to the wannabe stars.
If you don’t watch the show, congratulations.
You have better judgment than I do.
In any event, ABC is just launching the golden bachelor and the pitch is that a 72-year-old man is looking for love among a beautiful array of women, all of whom are in their sixties and seventies.
So right there, you know it’s fiction.
Most seventy-year-olds think thirty-year-olds are a good start.
Hats off to ABC-TV for the whole concept, but for starters, I’m wondering where the golden part comes in.
You may remember a TV show called Golden Girls, in which one of the women was in her eighties and the others were in their fifties.
Back then, the fifties were considered your golden years.
That’s changed, thank God, and for a scientific reason.
People who write television shows are getting older.
They think they’re aging like fine wine rather than avocados.
I do, too, so let the fiction begin.
That’s why these days the sequel to Sex & The City, entitled And Just Like that, features a bunch of fifty-year-olds who are the same age as the Golden Girls used to be, but those crazy kids are having the time of their lives, back-sliding with boyfriends, wearing statement jewelry, and looking better-dressed that any sixty-something I know.
Okay, me.
But then again, who wants a TV show about a lady in a T-shirt and Patagonia shorts.
And those are my dress shorts.
You don’t even wanna know my normal shorts.
Anyway, I can’t wait for the Golden Batchelor show, which brought me to wonder, would I want to be on the show?
After all, I’m golden.
In fact, I’ve been golden all my life, and so have you.
Joni Mitchell said so.
We are stardust, we are golden, and that’s the story I’m going with.
In any event, I’m famously celibate, I mean, single, but I don’t know if I’m single enough to go on television and wait to be picked by some guy.
Frankly it’s not the TV-part that bothers me. And I wouldn’t be embarrassed because I’m hardly ever embarrassed anymore, by anything.
If you ask me, that’s a gift of old age.
We stop worrying about what people think of us, which leads to normal shorts.
But I don’t think I would like the wait-to-be-picked part.
When I look back at my life, I think my problem was that I waited to be picked rather than doing the picking.
It was like being asked to dance only it ended up in a post-nup.
Another term we had back then was wallflower, and that was the girl who stood along the wall because nobody was picking her.
I’m hoping that term will become as obsolete as bachelorette.
Oh, wait a minute.
In my day, girls had to wait to be asked for a date or to the prom, and in fact, at my high school, there was a Sadie Hawkins Day, in which the girls were supposed to ask the boys to the dance.
So one day of the year you had agency.
The other 364 were up for grabs.
I’m not the type of woman who sits in a chair and ways to be handed a rose anymore.
I would think, just one?
And in the words of the immortal Miley Cyrus, I can buy my own flowers.
Obviously the rules of romance are changing, and the great thing is there’s no rules. You can make them go up as you go along, and you probably should. The only thing I’ve learned is that they should be your rules, not somebody else’s.
Love is not one size fits all.
If this Golden Bachelor continues, next will be a show starring Platinum Bachelors, who are age eighty and over.
I personally have no problem with any of this.
I’ll take experience over youth any day, in any situation.
And as a logical matter, it means the marriages that will last the longest are the ones made on the Golden Bachelor.
But those of the exact people who have the least time.
Ironic, no?
That’s not something that even science can fix.
Yet.
copyright Lisa Scottoline 2023