What we talk about when we talk about love: declarations of love in the American and Australian Bachelor/ette Franchises

The Bachelor/ette franchise is ‘not just global, but “glocal”’. While the format remains essentially the same across different territories, local cultural priorities inflect the show in various ways. This paper explores the variance in local attitudes towards romance by analysing the final declarations of love from 2013 to 2017 across the American and Australian iterations of the Bachelor/ette franchise. This declaration of love is the climax of the show’s narrative, as well as the moment ‘real’ emotion from the Bachelor/ette penetrates the artificial constraints of the diegesis. Using a distant reading method inspired by the work of Franco Moretti, and an understanding of romantic ritual drawn from the work of Eva Illouz this paper finds that the scripts inherent in this narrative episode are markedly different. While both territories share a common romantic vocabulary, the utterance of the phrase ‘I love you’ is most important to the ritual of the declaration scene in Australia, while in the USA, the exchange of ritual objects is necessary to make this utterance meaningful. This highlights differing local expectations about what romantic love should look and feel like.