Juan Pablo Galvais has been turning women off with some regularity on “The Bachelor” all this season. Even on his finale Monday, he said something that so offended one finalist she thought of fleeing.
Clare Crawley, the hairstylist from Sacramento, ended up staying, but when Juan Pablo didn’t choose her in the end, she literally pushed him away and told him off.
“I would never want my children having a father like you,” she said.
“I’m glad I didn’t pick her!” Juan Pablo says to himself.
He did pick Nikki Ferrell, the pediatrician from Kansas City who was pretty confident about her chances. But he held off on any proposal.
“I have a ring here in my pocket, but I’m not going to use it,” he told her, rubbing it in.
“I’m not 100 percent ready to propose,” he said. “But I’m 100 percent sure I don’t want to let you go.”
So she accepts the crummy rose.
What Nikki really wanted was to have Juan Pablo tell her how he felt about her. She’d been telling him she loved him the past few times they’d seen each other. But in the tradition of “The Bachelor,” he had to say nothing back. Until he had made his decision.
So now that he did he finally said it: “I really really like you.”
As disappointing as this may have been to Nikki, it was devastating for host Chris Harrison, who kept thinking this dud of a bachelor was depriving the show of its usual hearts and flowers ending: if not a ring, at least give us a declaration of love.
But even on the aftershow, “The Bachelor: After the Final Rose,” Juan Pablo refused to utter the words, saying such views would be private.
Hello? Did he know what show he was on?
This is like being on “Jeopardy” and then declining to share your final point total because you suddenly wanted to keep it to yourself.
“Twelve years I’ve been doing this and this is a ‘Bachelor’ first,” Harrison said.
Nikki, still looking hopeful (or naive) said that’s just the way he is; he shows his feelings and doesn’t say it.
“I know he cares about me a lot,” she said in the aftershow. “If he wasn’t invested in this relationship, he wouldn’t be with me. I’m not going to force it. It’s on his time.”
Still, the way he refused to answer Harrison’s questions, his inability to read people’s feelings and situations, and petulance when he feels he’s being interrupted in an argument make him seem like the worst catch (Let this be a lesson, ladies who drool over hunks ).
Of course both women were amply warned about his behavior when they met his family in the first hour of the telecast. “Juan Pablo is not easy,” his own mother said. He likes to watch TV all weekend, she warned. “He’s not an easy guy,” the father echoed. “He is very rude,” the mother said.
And his cousin basically asked both women the kind of question henchmen in kidnapping gangs ask: Will you run off when he gets bad?
Clare was still sure of how things were going until she took a helicopter ride with Juan Pablo and he said something to her when the cameras weren’t on.
Something about how they hardly knew one another, Clare said, adding “he loved hooking up with me. But the words used were worse.”
It was, she said, “insulting, offensive and made me feel awful.”
When they talked about it, he wanted to kiss first, but listened to her complaints as if he cared in a way the pride of Canada, Sharleen Joynt, said was patronizing.
The final date with Nikki went better, but she was pensive because he hadn’t indicated his feelings for her (something, to be fair, few bachelors do until the end).
But Juan Pablo has been so inarticulate throughout the season, spouting the same cliches (“she is amazing,” “I really like this girl”) amid his Ricky Ricardo catchwords (“Ay yi yi!”), that producers actually changed the format of the final rose ceremony such that it is the women who make the main speeches.
(Probably because Juan Pablo’s own speeches had lines in them like, “I wish the Earth sucked me today because this is the hardest decision ever”).
The whole finale was seen with the same live audience that stuck around for the after show. That meant unnecessary cut-ins of people in the studio watching the same show we are watching (or trying to watch if it weren’t for the unnecessary cut-in squares).
Asking studio audience members what they thought would happen only wasted time early in the three hour (!) process. But it was telling that they could be heard cheering when Clare put her hands up to Juan Pablo at the final rose, or were silent as a tomb after his most hurtful gaffes.
The studio audience by contrast gave a standing ovation to Andi Dorfman, who had told off and left Juan Pablo two weeks ago, after her night in the fantasy suite turned into a nightmare. She was announced as the new Bachelorette for its season that starts May 19, but she’ll probably be a boring one.
Usually they hype the unveiling of the new Bachelorette with more foreshadowing but Harrison saved his hype for the fact that Juan Pablo would have a big surprise for him in the after show.
But when the time came, no, he said he didn’t have one at all (other than that he picked Nikki). Chalk up another disappointment from Juan Pablo.
Actually the biggest surprise may have been that he spent a whole season supposedly looking for something he ultimately could not even say.