ABSTRACT
The Bachelor/ette franchise is “not going global, but ‘glocal’ (Trelease 2017)”. While the format remains essentially the same across different territories, local cultural priorities inflect the show in various ways. This chapter will explore the variance in local attitudes towards romance by analysing the climatic breakup scenes in season finales across the American and Australian iterations of the Bachelor/ette franchises. This will complement my existing work of the final declarations of love. While what we are looking for is often revealing when it comes to attitudes towards romance, revealing what we are not looking for and/or haven’t found – something integral to the Bachelor/ette breakup scene – may perhaps be even more revealing, and serve an important purpose in highlighting different local expectations about what romantic love should look like and feel like.
