Chad Kultgen - How to Win The Bachelor: The Secret to Finding Love and Fame on Americas Favorite Reality Show

How to Win The Bachelor

The Secret to Finding Love and Fame on Americas Favorite Reality Show

Chad Kultgen & Lizzy Pace

Creators of the Game of Roses Podcast

Gallery Books

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2022 by Chad Kultgen and Elizabeth Pace

Illustration Credits: Rose by Juan Pablo Bravo from the Noun Project: 1, 23, 51, 91, 119, 151, 167, 191, 209, 219, 235, 243; Ring by Marco Livolsi from the Noun Project: 21, 310; Heart by Three Six Five from the Noun Project: 30; Cross by ade from the Noun Project: 30; emoticon by Caesar Rizky Kurniawan for the Noun Project: 31; Rose by Tatiana from The Noun Project: 31; Rose by SBTS from the Noun Project: 31; pray by AliWijaya from the Noun Project: 31; Microphone by Maxim Kulikov from the Noun Project: 31; twin by Adrien Coquet from the Noun Project: 91; droplet by AlePio from the Noun Project: 310.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books hardcover edition January 2022

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Illustrations by Matt Johnstone

Data Assistant Katie Finnigan

Jacket design by Kelli McAdams

Jacket photographs by Adobe Stock and Getty Images

Photograph of Chad Kultgen courtesy of the author

Photograph of Lllly Pace Sam Miron (@samrmiron)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-7294-7

ISBN 978-1-9821-7296-1 (ebook)

I f youre reading this, chances are good that youre a Bachelor fan. And if youre a Bachelor fan you know that can mean a lot of different things.

Maybe youre a casual fan. You catch a few episodes near the end of a season every once in a while. You know the names of some of the most recent Bachelors and Bachelorettes, but you dont think about it much more than that.

Maybe youre a devoted Bachelor fan. You look forward to every season. You do your very best to watch every episode as it airs and sometimes you even go to Monday night viewing parties with an equally devoted group of friends who have put together a fantasy league.

Maybe youre even a hard-core Bachelor fan. The world would have to end for you to miss an episode. You throw the viewing parties and run the fantasy league. You follow everyone from the show on all social media platforms and Us Weekly is your New York Times.

And maybe, god help you, you are a Bachelor superfan. For you the show isnt a frivolous guilty pleasure to be enjoyed over wine and popcorn. It is a way of life. You find it difficult to watch the show with other people because you need to rewind and pause incessantly in order to scrutinize every frame of the document. You started a separate Instagram account just to follow some of your favorite Bachelor contestants a few years back and over time it has become your primary account. You know everything about all of their lives, including the names and IG follower counts of their babies. You listen to twenty hours of Bachelor-related podcasts per week, whether the show is in season or not. And when a friend casually tells you theyre obsessed with The Bachelor, your first impulse is to grab them by the shoulders, shake them as hard as you can, and scream into their face, No. Youre. Not!

When we (Chad and Lizzy) first met we were squarely in the casual fans category, just two coworkers who bonded over our mutual interest in the show and started watching together with a few other friends during Season 19 of The Bachelor. Wed have a few drinks, have a few laughs at Chris Souless expense, and back then we still had the audacity to talk over the show, engaging in conversations that werent even related to The Bachelor at all. Oh, how things would change.

At the end of Kaitlyn Bristowes season of The Bachelorette, we started to augment our Monday night viewing ritual. Chad began taking pictures of the TV screen with his phone and making memes of the funny moments from the show. Lizzy started writing short recaps for a blog that also highlighted the humorous elements of The Bachelor. It was all innocuous at first, just some new ways to engage with what we thought was a harmless guilty pleasure and enhance our experience as viewers. Completely innocent fun.

But by Season 20, Ben Higgins, Chad was compulsively photographing the TV screen literally thousands of times per episode to make thirty to forty memes every week and Lizzys recaps were averaging more words than a featured article in the New Yorker, complete with dozens of GIFs she made from footage of the show. But that was only the beginning. When the memes and the recaps werent enough to satisfy our deepening obsession, we did the unthinkable: We started a Bachelor podcast.

When a friend or family member asks you what youve been up to lately, the last thing they want to hear is, I started a podcast. And then they really do not want to hear, Its about The Bachelor. So we endured reactions that ranged from halfhearted, empty promises to listen to our show to sincere concerns for our mental health. But we werent deterred. The more we talked about The Bachelor, the more time we devoted to the study of it, the more we uncovered the more we knew we were on to something.

Season after season of intense, almost frame-by-frame scrutiny and hour after hour of impassioned podcast discourse about the minutiae of The Bachelor began to reveal repeating patterns that led us to a conclusion that has changed how we watch the show forever. Alongside baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, we have come to understand that The Bachelor is a professional sport. And after twenty-five seasons, we knew there was a robust enough body of statistical data to be gathered that we could determine the best players of all time and the best plays to be made in any given situation. Even beyond that, we realized that literal strategies could be derived from the analysis of past plays to help any potential player win the entire game. This eye-opening revelation would ultimately take us where no Bachelor fan has gone before. In order to get that data and make sense of it, someone was going to have to go through eighteen years worth of episodes and meticulously record every Steal, every kiss, every Tattle, and every tear. And as much as we didnt want to admit it, we knew that someone had to be us. There simply was no one else who would willingly subject themselves to a Clockwork Orangestyle force-feeding of the entire show.