February 23, 2022

The Bachelor Ever After

Tonight on get ready for a Theoretiquette unlike anything you've ever seen before. The most obsessive wiki-spreadsheet-scraper begins their journey to find stats on love.

TL: I really believe I’m going to find my answer this season

VOICEOVER 1: Oh my god, did you see their spreadsheets [girl squeals]

TL: Everything has led to this moment so that I can prove to America if you don't give up on data, eventually you'll find it.

And the unprecedented episode of Theoretiquette starts right now.

Last week’s edition of the newsletter was a little intense, diving into the numbers that show how meaningless we are in the grand scheme of earth. Also there were a lot of charts. So this week is going to be a little lighter: both in topic and quantity of charts. We are going to dive into the marriage and divorce rates in The Bachelor franchise, and how they compare to the rates across the US.

You might think this would be pretty simple to figure out, but I ran into a few challenges.

The first step was getting the numbers of the divorce and marriage rates for the US. This was not as cut and dry as I expected. Partially because of the criteria I was originally looking for: my goal was to answer the question “How many marriages end in divorce?” But this was a flawed question. Because despite that often quoted statistic that “half of all marriages end in divorce” that’s kind of a hard thing to say definitively. I mean all marriages end; the question is whether they end in divorce or death. So you can’t know for sure that a marriage isn’t going to end in divorce until it ends…the other way.

With a little bit of reframing the question, I was able to find data from the National Center for Health Statistics(NCHS) that documents how many marriages and divorces or annulments there are in the states every year, along with the estimated total population (not just of marriageable adults) that year. From there, I calculated a marriage and divorce rate per 1000 people.

This is probably the best way to calculate these numbers, but still left me wanting. I couldn’t determine if these were just divorces per year, or number of people who got divorced each year, and so on. Maybe the difference would be negligible, but I still wanted to know: If Joe gets married in Las Vegas, then gets it annulled the next day, then does the same thing a few months later, does Joe count as a person who got a divorce, aka one, or do we count each divorce, aka two. Surely there aren’t that many people getting multiple divorces in a given year, but likewise, I’m sure Joe isn’t the only one making some questionable decisions out there. But alas, I couldn’t track down confirmation on that one way or another.

Coming up tonight on Theoretiquette…

VOICEOVER 1: Oh, my God! There it is!

...TL's journey to find The Bachelor franchise data begins.

VOICEOVER 2: I am so happy it's you.

TL: Whatever preconceived notions the readers have of the data, my hope is that they come in with a clean slate and an open mind.

Next, on Theoretiquette.

Based on the framework of the numbers from the NCHS, I decided to try to replicate them as closely as possible for the Bachelor Nation. This means tracking down: how many marriages, how many divorces, and how many participants have been a part of the franchise.

Finding the information on how many weddings and divorces there had been within Bachelor Nation was actually a little more challenging, or obnoxious, than I expected. The Wikipedia data generally tells you, for each season, whether the couple got engaged, and whether they’re still together. So a couple who got married and divorced would show the same as a couple who broke it off as soon as their contractual obligation was up (Yes/No). And a couple that was still together but never married would show up as a No/Yes. I couldn’t just use Google Sheets to parse the data straight from Wikipedia, so I had some digging to do.

For the uninitiated, lest you think I’m being dramatic, making a fuss about hunting down this information for an assignment that I literally gave to myself, let me give you a quick rundown on the franchise. (I have only watched a few episodes of The Bachelor, and a few of Bachelor in Paradise, so I’m no expert here). So far, there have been 25 seasons of The Bachelor, 18 seasons of The Bachelorette, and 7 seasons of Bachelor in Paradise, for a total of 50 seasons. And with a few plot twists producing extra couples over the years, that gave me a lot of couples that I had to research individually to see if they had ever married, and if so, if they had divorced.¹

There’s no single database of all the participants that I could find, so that left me scraping the data season by season. And I couldn’t just sum up the results to figure out how many participants had appeared on the reality franchise over the years, because there have been repeat appearances and cross-pollination between series.² After removing duplicate appearances within a given series, the raw data gave me 1,278 as the number of participants, but once I combined the three series and removed cross-pollinators, that number came down to 1,117 participants. That’s a lot of people.

Anyway, after the arduous process of looking up each couple one by one, I was able to calculate the number of proposals, marriages, divorces, and participants there have been throughout the franchise’s twenty years on the air.

Coming up next on Theoretiquette… Can TL make a spreadsheet out of the tangled web of The Bachelor franchise?

VOICEOVER 1: They’re like that choo-choo train we all read about in school that just keeps chugging along. Keeps chugging. Just keeps going…³

VOICEOVER 2: Persistent.

VOICEOVER 1: ... and going and going and going.

Stay tuned for more Theoretiquette.

As a Bachelor Nation neophyte, I was actually surprised by all of these numbers. The fact that over a thousand people have been on at least one season of the show alone surprised me. I knew most of the seasons ended in at least one proposal, but I didn’t realize only 11 weddings had actually happened. I was even more surprised to find that of those 11 weddings, only three have ended in divorce (so far). In fact, the couple produced by the very first season of The Bachelorette, Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter, got married on December 6, 2003 and are still together, and have had two children. In addition to the more “traditional” results, there are a couple of “plot twist” marriages in there, where the lead ended up breaking up with the “winner” and marrying the runner up.

Initially, for the comparisons, I looked at the “FastStats” from the NCHS, but they were provisional numbers from 2019. And when I considered the fact that the show had been on the air since 2002, it seemed worthwhile to use rates that reflected that whole time, and not just the numbers for one year. I was able to track down the numbers for 2002-2019. I summed all of them, adjusted them to represent per 1,000 people, and finally had equivalent numbers for the both sets upon which I could make comparisons.

Because of the way the stats are reported to the NCHS, the populations with which to calculate the rate are different, but obviously are the same for the Bachelor franchise, so I did a few calculations to get the right numbers and that gives us this…

Coming up on Theoretiquette:

VOICEOVER 1: I can’t believe this spreadsheet would do that!

VOICEOVER 2: I just don’t think those numbers are here for the right reasons…

VOICEOVER 3: [crying]

TL: I know I can make this work. I just need to find the right equivalent data.

Stay tuned for more of the thrilling conclusion of tonight’s episode of Theoretiquette.

Yes, you’re reading this right. Bachelor Nation has a higher marriage rate and lower divorce rate than the US as a whole. When you compare the divorce rate over the marriage rate for the US by year, to the Bachelor Nation’s number (27.3%), the closest any year gets to the “failure” rate of Bachelor Nation is 2016 with a rate of 34.5%, still 7.2% higher than the reality franchise’s rate.

I’ll be honest, this really made me reevaluate my judgment of the franchise. I could go on about possible, but cynical reasons why these numbers are what they are, but far be it from me, unmarried at 32 years old, to criticize the franchise that has led to marriages lasting as long as 19 years (so far).

I’m tempted to analyze the numbers specific to each show. For example, what take away might I glean from the fact that none of the marriages produced by The Bachelor (in 2010 and 2014) have resulted in divorce, while half of the marriages produced by Bachelor in Paradise ended in divorce.⁴ But it’s really not even fun to make any kind of judgements based on sample sets of two and four weddings, respectively. One more wedding from the next season of the endlessly-running franchise could ruin my data, and with the 51st (cumulative) season airing right now, that’s too much of a risk, even for my questionable analysis.

Next time, on Theoretiquette– What’s that? The writer hasn’t figured out what’s happening next week? Well, in that case– Subscribe and stay tuned to find out what happens next week on…Theoretiquette.

You can explore the data used in this edition of Theoretiquette here.