Let’s just get this out of the way up front: yes, Gerry apparently has sex with both of his final two women on this week’s Golden Bachelor. (It’s never explicitly confirmed, which is more than fine by us.) And yes, he euphemizes the whole business like it’s going out of style. If this author had to hear it, so do you, so here are a few of those choice phrases in no particular order:
- “Closed-door time”
- “Knock boots”
- Asked to host Jesse Palmer: “Do you ever feel like your parents are coming down the stairs with a little extra spring in their step?”
- “I’m not gonna pass this up. It might be the last time in my life.”
The younger Bachelors and Bachelorettes all seem to know that you should have a pretty good sense of who you’re going to end up with by the time you get to the fantasy suites. They seem to know that it probably isn’t the best idea to sleep with someone you’re not going to choose, to protect both them and your future partner from feeling spurned, jealous, or both. Better yet, if you know who you’re going to pick now, maybe do the kind thing and send the other person home without them having to go through the agony of waiting for an answer. It’s happened so many times on the original show.
But Gerry, as always, does not have the capacity to think more than 12 hours into the future (or past, as we learn). As we’ve also come to expect, our dear Golden Bachelor is so hyper-focused on his own journey that he seems to care less and less about the actual women he’s courting. It’s Theresa’s first time having sex with anyone since her husband died, but hey! It might be the last time in Gerry’s life.
Leslie’s up first and the two rappel down a legitimately terrifying-looking cliff before departing for a romantic dinner. Leslie sobs about the possibility of finally spending a birthday with a man that she loves and Gerry says he wants commitment until death do them part. Before even spending the night together, he tells her he’s in love with her and he thinks she’s the one and there’s no one else he’d rather try to figure out the rest of his life with. Seems like tomorrow might be pretty rough for Theresa, huh?
Wrong! Sure, Gerry’s sullen for a little while as he starts to process the incredible pain he’ll have to inflict on one of these women in the coming days, but Theresa quickly gets him back on track and Leslie is all but forgotten. “I’m so glad I stayed open-minded. I might have missed the opportunity of a lifetime,” Gerry says the morning after they spend the night together. He also apparently told Theresa he loved her. “I feel like it’s the first day of the rest of my life,” he says. This writer’s notes are just a series of unintelligible key smashes from this point on, so let’s start to wrap this up.
Before we get to Gerry and Theresa’s shared evening, however, we learn at a romantic dinner between the two that Gerry doesn’t know what she does for work. She tells him that she used to be a day trader, to which he responds with genuine surprise, “I had no idea how responsible you are.” Somewhere along the line, Gerry pegged Leslie as “adventurous” and Theresa as “safe.” While he’s figuring out which life path to take, let’s just hope he remembers that Adventurous and Safe are real people with real feelings who he just convinced even more that they were the only one for him. We have to wait two weeks for this show to wrap up, but when it does it looks like it’ll be a bloodbath the likes of which ABC has never before seen.
The Golden Bachelor is available to stream now on Hulu.