Okay, after ELEVEN FREAKING BACHELORS (Alex, Aaron, Andrew, Bob, Jesse, Byron, Charlie, Travis, Lorenzo, Andy, and Brad -- I am telling you, there have been eleven) have failed to find love, can we just call this off? Please? The track record is zero. Zero! If you throw in The Bachelorette, you wind up with exactly one success in the bland-leading-the-bland union of Trista "More Peeeenk" Rehn and Ryan "Poetry Man" Sutter, but that gives you two more failures as well (Jen "I Choose Me" Schefft and Meredith "Who Remembers?" Phillips), and we can't not throw in good old Tick-Tock Mary, who was just arrested for punching the Bachelor in the face.

I mean, okay. Trista and Ryan. But that's out of fourteen attempts. You could throw fourteen emergency appendectomies on the F train, and you might get one marriage. This is no way to meet people. Can I experiment with fontifying?

The Bachelor is no way to meet people.

You have undoubtedly heard already about Brad, and how he's spent the last two weeks being called everything from a jerk to a sociopath (sociopath!) for choosing not to pursue a relationship with either of the two women he liked the most, out of 25 women he had no role in selecting. As has been fully explored over in our Bachelor thread to a point where we're all embarrassed to still care, you can certainly fault Brad for saying things he shouldn't have said, wanting to be the good guy, and so forth. But really, what Brad demonstrates is that there is no way for any relationship to start on this show except in stupidity.

If the guy likes the girl enough that it might actually work out between them, it's going to kill the relationship that (1) he has to date a gaggle of other girls at the same time; and (2) they're going to have to be separated for months during airing, during which time she gets to watch episodes in which he makes out with other women. If she doesn't care enough to be disturbed by that, she doesn't care.

But all this is beside the point, right? Don't the statistics prove it? If your dating service worked this well, you would be driven out of business in a state of abject shame. I call upon the producers of The Bachelor to quit. You are failures! You have failed! You are running a scam, and we are all onto you! We could do better setting up our friends, and we are no good at setting up our friends!

I'm just saying, if we were 0-for-11 at anything, we'd move on to another line of work. FOR SHAME.