We start this week of The Bachelorette exactly where we left off. This whole situation is tiring. Obviously, Ian wanted Kaitlyn to get on her knees and beg, but he forgot where he was. This is not the show where you make women beg for your affection and trip over themselves. That show is called Big Love, and it’s been off the air for four years.
Ian doesn’t understand human nature or people or feelings. He keeps asking Kaitlyn if she really wants someone with a sense of humor. Yeah, dude. Most people want a partner with a sense of humor. Most relationships don’t consist of two people staring at each other reading their résumés and mutually masturbating. Most relationships don’t consist of two people wearing black turtlenecks and listening to jazz talking about their intellectual side and how shallow the plebes are … and mutually masturbating. For as “unintellectual†as Kaitlyn is, you can’t deny that homegirl would be pretty fun to hang out with.
Kaitlyn dismisses him and sends him on his way. Ian doesn’t leave humbly. He spends the entire limo ride complaining that he missed having real conversations about life instead of talking about sex and farts. He is being punished for being an intellectual. He has original thoughts. Women don’t have trouble relating to me because I’m deep. If you’re older than 20 years old and telling people you’re deep with a straight face, you’re a goddamn chore.
Ian spent the whole summer leading up to this season telling his friends that this would be a cakewalk. He went to Princeton. He ran track. He got hit by a car. He’d swoop in and sweep the heartbroken Kaitlyn off her feet. Instead, he found an actual, living, breathing woman with a sense of self who wasn’t demolished when a man didn’t like her. One of those troublemakers. So he doubted himself, and the only way to make himself feel better was to put a woman down for having wants and needs. Masculinity: Women aren’t people!
Kaitlyn is distraught, and Nick comes to comfort her. This asshole. Kaitlyn and Nick make out for about 600 minutes because that’s the best way to comfort someone who was just accused of being all about sex. Shawn sees them and furrows his impeccable brow.
It’s time for the Rose Ceremony at the frickin’ Alamo because America. That’s why. Kaitlyn is tired of people questioning her and her intentions. She’s here for real love. That’s why she’s a make-out bandit right now.
Cupcake says some corny shit, Joshua still has a messed-up haircut, and we get into the Rose Ceremony. Jared, Cupcake, J “Sure, my parents pay my rent, but—†J, Ben Z., and Tanner all get roses. Joshua and Kirkland Signature Mad Max get sent home.
Host Chris comes in and tells the contesticles and Kaitlyn that they are going to the white people ancestral homeland: Ireland! Kaitlyn gives us a couple facts about Ireland, like it has everything from pubs to cathedrals. Churches and bars. That’s a virgin-whore mouthful. It’s in Ireland that we finally get to the bang heard ’round the world.
Kaitlyn and Nick spend the entire day strolling around Dublin holding hands and making out in alleyways. They are insufferable as they traipse through Dublin’s parade of quirky street performers. Nick protects her from birds. (One of the commenters pointed out that it’s ironic that Kaitlyn is terrified of birds but has two tattooed on her elbows.) Nick buys them claddagh rings and they make out on a bridge or something. I’m losing track of all the locations where they make out. A pub, a church, the James Joyce Centre. Okay, maybe not that last one.
The handsy pair go on a date in a church because that’s totally normal. They are all over each other again because a church is the most sensual location on Earth. I couldn’t read all of the subtitles of their breathy whispers because there was a tornado warning in my area and the ticker covered the lower third of the screen. I couldn’t see their hands either.
I think Nick said he was felting Kaitlyn, which I can only assume is an Irish sexual rite of pass— oh! He said he was feeling her. That makes more sense. For a competition where men are telling her that they are falling in love with her and that she might be the one, she falls hard for someone who tells her he’s just “feelin’ it.†Eye roll.
He picks her up in the street and she wraps her legs around him. They go home and bang.
Kaitlyn says they deserve this time together. What? How do you deserve a bang?
Oh, other stuff does happen in this episode, but I’ve got around 300 words left in this recap, and do you want to hear about Cupcake’s Irish wake song? Or how Tanner rhymed the word planner with his own name? That’s what I thought. Bang fallout. (Jared got the date rose and the frickin’ Cranberries showed up.)
The next morning, Kaitlyn stands out on her balcony in an open cardigan and goes through all the emotions after a bang: joy, residual horniness, asking yourself (and the reality-TV producers) if this has ever happened before, and socially mandated guilt. She feels guilty because she’s in relationships with a bunch of other guys and she’s never had to feel this guilt, but she does now. You see that? She’s never had to feel this guilt before because this guilt is something you have to do. For someone who described herself as a bandit when it came to intimacy, she sure has bought in to the idea that sex is sacred. Everyone needs to relax. She’s on a show where she is dating 15 guys at once.
Regardless of her sexual guilt management, Kaitlyn seriously needs some side-piece management. Her main concern for the morning after is that she doesn’t want Nick to tell everyone. Have you met Nick? Nick holds court on the couch like a giddy college freshman in the dining hall at breakfast who got laid for the first time since breaking up with her high-school boyfriend and Âeveryone needs to know.
Each new contesticle who comes down to wait for the date card gets to hear how romantic and intimate and authentic their night making out on the couch was. Quit with all the code, bruh. We get it. I wonder what Andi is thinking right now. I wonder if Nick and Kaitlyn made fiancé-type love.
Of all the guys, Shawn is the most shaken up by Kaitlyn and Nick sleeping together because, apparently, Kaitlyn and Shawn stayed up talking and she told him he was the one. He takes aside his best friend in the competition, a PA in a hoodie, and tells him he can’t do this anymore.
Next week: Shawn freaks out and EVERYONE cries.
Brack and Britt whittle artisan love talismans from driftwood.