The fairy tale of Gerry and Theresa

And other links for your Sunday

Gerry and Theresa, the erstwhile couple from ABC’s hit “The Golden Bachelor” announced that they were erstwhile last week. After a very short marriage, the two are getting divorced and people are mad.

As

Amanda Montei

pointed out a lot of the rage seems to stem from confusion about why the couple wouldn’t try harder to stay married. ABC created a fairytale and people are mad a couple isn’t trying harder to maintain it.

But the fairytale was a little more like a Potemkin Village. It’s now becoming apparent, the Gerry, the man we all wanted to believe was a nice loving widower, was far more complex. He had dated other women and allegedly treated some of them pretty crappily. His work record was dodgy. And he started dating a woman less than two months after his wife died. None of these things are illegal or immoral. It’s just that ABC worked so hard to airbrush this guy into something he was not, to sell us something that doesn’t exist, but we so desperately wanted to believe in.