Millionaire Matchmaking, Bachelorettes, and those crazy housewives

Reality TV is a fact of life these days. Finding your Mr. Or Ms. Right on national television? I’m pretty sure that’s official country song wrong place number 23 to look for love. There are, however, things to be learned from the seekers of everlasting happiness and romance in prime time.

Patty Stanger, “The Millionaire Matchmaker” on Bravo, spends an hour a week matching up difficult personalities. The editing surely makes things a) more amusing and b) less frustrating than they appear in the tiny mirror on the side of our guilty-pleasure-mobiles. But Patty does have some valuable things to say (and some funny ones to be sure).

The most important advice I’ve heard her give is “make love a priority and love will come.” the same needs to be true after love has been found. When planning your wedding, love still has to be the priority so that it will know how to stick around.

The Bachelorette is incomprehensible to me, personally. It’s some perverse version of sorority rush with all the catty parts and none of the redeeming sisterhood. If you can learn anything from this one, it’s be careful what you wish for. And for goodness sake, don’t wish to be locked up in a house full of weepy overly made up, emotionally underdeveloped girls.

Last but not least we have the Unsinkable Kim Wozniak, of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. She found her latest football player love at a charity event she was attending to support another housewife’s penchant for dancing badly in public. And now she’s (on the show) about to pop with a new baby boy. Now that’s one way to make love stick around

The reality tv trend has got to hit a wall at some point. Let’s keep the super glam wedding shows and dispense with the drama. Is anybody with me?

Where’s my remote?

-Dinah

Once Upon a Time, at the Dining Room Table…

Photo of a dining room table piled with objects
Don't let clutter kill your fairy tale romance!

We dined, once, at our dining room table.  Then we got engaged. Suddenly piles of bridal magazines, boxes of invitations, and a flower girl basket took up residence.  Don’t let it happen to you.

“Why?” you may ask. “All that lovely flat space for storage.  Certainly a few months of dinner elsewhere won’t kill us.”  And you’re right – but it does, eventually, kill the romance in a relationship.  Normally romance doesn’t come easy, or cheap, but there is nothing so simple and special as to sit across from each other, light a few candles, and have a meal.  It doesn’t matter if you are eating frozen waffles on paper plates.  There’s something in the quality of the light that makes you both remember why you got engaged, married, pinned, whatever.

So watch one of those HGTV clutter busting shows, and keep that dining room table clear for some romance.  Sunday nights are perfect for a lovely dinner, but at the table – not in front of ABC’s promising new show…Once Upon a Time.