Welcome to our Thursday recap of The Bachelor — you can read Sinead Stubbin’s excessively funny Power Ranking from Wednesday here.

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AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. *SCREAMS FOREVER, SCREAMS TURN INTO LAUGHTER, LAUGHTER TURNS INTO TEARS*

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

WHAT.

What???

JUST WHAT??????????

As Brittany says: “What a giant waste of time that was.”

Ol’ Nicky Honeybabe, The Honey Boochy, The Badger-Balm, Nick ‘Cummin And Check Out Our Low Prices’, or best known as Australia’s FOOL, has absolutely munted the whole competition and decided to choose… nobody.

*Nobody by Mitski plays on repeat*

In a kind of granular summary of this entire blighted show, we were treated to over two hours of Nick using his dense beef-stock brain to draw out the decision of…  not making a decision. First, he doesn’t choose Sophie (blonde, slightly younger) and then he makes us think that he’s chosen Brittany (brunette, slightly older) and then he dumps them both.

Personally, I found it devastating: I had Brittany in the office sweep.

But also, on a more important level, Nick’s giant romantic red herring proves everything that I’ve been saying and fearing and shouting in this column. It both proves my initial thesis (love is a lie) but also mocks my entire quest to learn the rules of love from The Bachelor.

Let’s look, for one final time, at the terrible lessons about love that I’ve learned from The Bachelor:

NOTHING

I HAVE LEARNED NOTHING. We have all learned nothing. Nothing is to be learned from this whole pointless shit-fire.

The entire conceit of The Bachelor is that perhaps it is possible to create a sterile, scientific environment in which we can identify and utilise all the tools necessary to grow romance. It’s like lab-grown love: more clinical and contrived than the kind of love you find sprouting naturally on the savannah, but it’s essentially the same product. That’s the dream at least.

The Bachelor producers are insane Frankensteins, never stopping to ask whether it was ethical to sew together all these steaming chunks of romantic tropes and weird cliches into some kind of lumbering parody of a relationship.

But it’s all moot anyway because Nick Cummins has conclusively proven that the insane experiment does not work. It’s a fail. The Badgerlor did not find love.

“It is clear that I am falling in love with you, and that is like… wild,” says Sophie to Nick. That is wild. Wild and stupid and inconclusive and it means nothing.

There’s nothing to learn here.

Absolutely Nothing

There’s a kind of projected efficiency to The Bachelor which I was hoping would be transferrable to my everyday life.

At the beginning of the show, there are something like 25 to 30 contestants — a broad pool of people that Nick can choose from. We have to assume he had some say in their choosing, picking them from a kind of Tinder-esque set of attributes — nice photo, cool bio, funny yearbook quote. Then, in a condensed period of time, he gets to meet them all and spend weird chunks of time with them, riding jet-skis and throwing them out of helicopters.

Now think about how inefficient your own horrible dating life is. You either wait to meet someone in real life (rare, troublesome, don’t date people at work), get set up by mutual friends (potentially very awkward) or you use dating apps (the worst thing in the world). The theory behind all of these methods is that if you keep throwing yourself out there like a masochistic boomerang, you’ll eventually find the right person for you. It’s a marathon, not a sprint they say furiously, frothing at the mouth. It’s an endurance race, as much luck as it is powerful calves.

But Nick got to have good amounts of time and highly curated connections with more people than you’ll probably get to meet in an entire year. I’ve dated like three people this year, and that was exhausting. He had a smorgasbord, a feast.

And it didn’t work! There’s no positive take away here. No hints and tips.

Love Doesn’t Exist

“Everything will be perfect and I’ll be truly happy,” says Brittany, forecasting the chance that she will be chosen by our muscular Bachy.

That’s some dangerous utopian thinking, some fallacious hope. She’s somehow managed to overcome all the trauma from the betrayal of her past relationships to open up her tiny broken heart to someone new — on a nationally broadcasted polyamory competition too — and she’s had all that foolish trust and love thrown right back at her.

“Imagine pouring your heart out to someone and getting nothing back?” she asks.

Makes you think maybe you just… shouldn’t? The risk versus reward scales up dramatically after a while — nobody wants to have their stupid hearts broken. So, maybe just like… don’t fall in love. It’s the only truest way to stop it from happening.

“I am not able with all my conscience to wholeheartedly commit to you,” says Nicky Badger.

Everyone is annoyed at how much our time has been wasted, we’re annoyed at the fact we’ve been denied the beautiful fantasy that love is possible, for us and for TV entertainers, we’re annoyed that we had to watch a whole bunch of people get their hearts broken on TV for our insane entertainment FOR NO GOOD REASON, for no cathartic end. We’re absolutely boiling over with frustrated romantic feelings that have gone NOWHERE.

As a wise woman once said, “so much for our happy ending”.

So, the final terrible lesson about love that The Bachelor taught us is that love… doesn’t exist. I already knew that though, so I learned nothing.

What a waste of time!

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Patrick Lenton is an author and staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.