I am writing this blog post mere hours before the much-anticipated season finale of The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love Edition. Or, as I like to call it, Cringing While Watching a Ken Doll Pilot with No Personality Agonize Over Which Nitwit Girl He Will Propose to and Dump Two Months Later. People, break out the popcorn – this is entertainment to the max.

I first got hooked on the Bachelor and Bachelorette shows back in the olden days when I lived in a dorm room, my bed doubled as a couch, and my viewing apparatus was a 14-inch box that included a built-in VCR. (Kids, VCRs were machines that played movies using strange rectangular devices called video tapes. Now go to your room for making me feel old.) Once I moved in with my sorority sisters, watching The Bachelor became a weekly event. It was a great way to relax, hang out, put off writing that paper for another hour, and make fun of people who were prettier and stupider than we were. Or at least appeared that way on TV.

After we graduated, watching this parade of slut-tastic ridiculousness just wasn’t the same. When I scoffed out loud about how that blonde chick had a bad boob job and was wearing a pageant dress or how Jesse the football player smashed girls’ faces when he kissed them, I was either greeted by silence or a polite chuckle from my roommate or boyfriend. Where were my girls when I needed them??

While watching an episode during Lorenzo “Prince Toolbox” Borghese’s season, I happened to be talking with a couple of them on AOL instant messenger. (Kids, instant messenger is an old fashioned online messaging service that – wait a second, who said you could come out of your room??) And that, my friends, was when a tradition was born: The Bachelor Chat!

For those of you who don’t use AIM anymore, there is a “chat” function that allows you to create chat rooms and have conversations online with a group of people. For those of you who still use AIM – why? Anyway, we invited all of our friends to join our chats during The Bachelor episodes and pretty soon it became a weekly event. I especially looked forward to it since I had moved to St. Louis and most of my college friends were still in Chicago – it was a fun way to keep in touch.

Sadly, it seems the days of the Bachelor Chat may be going by the wayside. Since we all started chatting, many of us have gotten married, started new demanding careers or moved out of the Central time zone. It also doesn’t help that the episodes are now 2 hours long. Two hours?? Really, ABC? Thankfully, this group of friends has not yet been struck by the baby boom, but I guess that’s just a matter of time as well. Who knows, once we all have kids we might not even have time for reality TV – oh, the horror!

One thing that makes me kind of sad about getting older is the fact that life increasingly tends to get in the way of recreational guilty pleasures such as the Bachelor Chat. So listen up, friends who don’t have babies yet: I have a plan! Let’s wait a couple years and then all have babies at exactly the same time! If we sync up our lives this way, our kids will all be best friends and they can play together while we hang out, and then our kids can all marry each other and we’ll never lose touch just like one big happy family! Or commune…whatever.

Well if that brilliant plan doesn’t pan out for some reason, I guess my only hope is that our lives may calm down by the time we all retire and maybe then we can actually resume the Bachelor Chat or The Price Is Right Chat, or whatever old people will be watching in 30 years.

Addendum: Ok, it’s the following morning and now we all know that Vienna has won Jake’s heart (which according to him is still “crying” for Tenley – over a balcony perhaps?). The two lovebirds actually danced on the After the Final Rose special while Jeffrey Osborne (who?) sang On the Wings of Love in the background. And let me tell you, my eyes could not roll far enough back in my head to express the way I felt about this. Reality TV, I love you.

Random tip of the day: Doing an ab workout that includes 130 leg drops and 3 minute planks when you have a cold is NOT a good idea because oh my God it hurts to sneeze the next day.