This week’s episode of The Bachelorette centered around one man, and that man’s name is Chad. Chad, a luxury real estate agent from Oklahoma, enjoys eating meat, doing pull-ups with his suitcase attached to a weight belt, and other people’s inadequacies.
While JoJo was out enjoying her first group date, a firefighting competition to find out “who can take care of JoJo in an emergency situation” (Wells, a radio DJ with a normal, steroid-free body, turned white and almost passed out; “Don’t faint,” JoJo said in a bored manner to Wells, who complied), the rest of the guys were at the house learning a song that goes, roughly: “Jo Jo Jo Jo Jo Jo-o-o!”
Chad was having none of it.
Chad’s whole game appears to be pretending (or openly acknowledging) that he doesn’t give a shit about JoJo—at least not yet, because he hasn’t gotten to know her, and all these other guys obsessing over her already are fake. “You’re going to sing a song to a girl y’all have known, like, less than a day?” Chad scoffed at his surrounding competitors.
Chad wasn’t wrong in underscoring how weird it is to suddenly and unreservedly fawn over someone that you have barely spoken to, and his disdain for his dweeby, boring fellow competitors is also understandable, but Chad is not so much the relaxed normal brah he would like to portray—after all, he is on this reality show, competing to marry a woman he’s never met—as he is a rage-filled antagonizer whose primary courtship technique appears to be making women feel bad about themselves, which, unfortunately, seems to be exactly how a person wins JoJo’s attentions.
Chad went on the second group date, at ESPN—the men were very excited about this, because they love sports!—which involved a series of dumb gameshow-type competitions that Chad was too cool to fully participate in. In one of them, where the men spun around on a stick and proposed to JoJo with a giant ring, Chad simply ran up to JoJo, grabbed her butt, and said, “Will you marry me?” This did not suffice.
“What are all the things that you love about me?” JoJo asked Chad.
“I feel like in that moment you should already know that?” Chad responded, with all the warmth of your cruelest 7th grade boyfriend. When she pressed him, he said, “You need me to tell you all the things I love about you? Starting off a little naggy here.”
Later, Chad explained in front of everyone that he doesn’t know if he wants to marry JoJo yet, or what he likes about her, because he doesn’t really know her yet. He then proceeded to declare war on the men in the house by announcing that “everybody” else is there for the “wrong reasons.”
“This is the first beautiful girl you’ve ever seen?” he asked them, jabbing his finger at JoJo.
It was weird!
But Chad was rewarded with a makeout session, and later at the rose ceremony, the men became more and more agitated by his presence. After consuming an enormous amount of meat and chewing on what appeared to be a medium-sized piece of wood, Chad began to clap back.
“Yo, fuck you for real,” Chad told Alex, a tiny military guy, after Alex came up to him for the fourth or fifth time to air grievances. “Keep that up, you’re going to lose your damn teeth.”
“You are the most disrespectful dude in this entire house. You are a meltdown,” Alex responded enthusiastically, deploying an insult that was maybe from his time in the Marines, or maybe made up on the spot.
In his somewhat gentler conversations with JoJo, Chad managed to blatantly manipulate her into believing she was competing for his affections, rather than the other way around.
“I’m normally a cold, calculated kind of business guy, but I actually got home and really thought about you, which was a little bit different for me,” Chad told JoJo, after cutting in on another contestant’s one-on-one time for the zillionth time.
“You’re just funny, there’s so many different sides of you,” Jojo responded, calling him “mysterious.” She doubled down Tuesday, writing in her blog about the episode that “Chad is a complex guy with complex emotions.”
“Chad is not trying to hide the fact that he’s not getting along with a lot of these guys. He’s not trying to act like something that he’s not,” she told the cameras in an interview. Chad got a rose, and I believe I have some idea of who JoJo is supporting in the 2016 presidential election.
“I wish she would have told [Chad] to get the freak out,” grumbled Evan, the erectile dysfunction specialist. He also got a rose.
This should be quite a season.