On Monday, somewhere around 7.7 million souls will tune into the fifth episode of The Bachelor, and as more girls meet the axe, tensions are running high. Last week, bachelor Ben Higgins took one girl on a helicopter ride, followed by fireworks, while the others watched from their balcony in dismay. Someone had a panic attack; she began referring to Ben as her husband. (Several avowed that Ben is “the most amazing guy in the world,” though as SNL’s parody “Bland Man” suggests, this seems a challenging assertion to defend.) Besieged by jealousy, others have resorted to aggressive statements: “I’m going to punch her in the face. Like, seriously.” After two girls failed to receive roses at the end of the show and were sent home, they dissolved into dramatic weeping fits.

I tend to spend the show caught somewhere between cringing and gagging. I’m mostly coerced into watching by my friends, who have made it a weekly ritual, but I’m also a bit spellbound by the show’s puke-factor—like the squished bug you shrink from but can’t ignore. Even allowing for the histrionic tendencies of reality TV, The Bachelor is an absurd depiction of modern womanhood. It seems to exist in an alternate universe where women never broke out of the shackles of marriage and motherhood, never developed interests unrelated to men, and, instead of becoming intelligent adults, were frozen in a semi-infantilized stage of squealing girlhood. It is almost impossible to reconcile with the age of Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg: a world where women are earning more college degrees than men and make up the majority of the American workforce; a world, in fact, in which more women are choosing to remain unmarried then ever before.

By 2010, 46 percent of adults under 34 had never been married, a rise of 12 percentage points in just a decade. In a “dramatic reversal” in historic American marriage trends, according to the Population Reference Bureau, the proportion of young adults who had never been married actually exceeded those who were. In 1960, 60 percent of women were married by age 29; today, only 20 percent are.

Now, for the first time in American history, single women outnumber married women. As Rebecca Traister puts it in her upcoming book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, “Abstention from or delay of marriage may have been a conscious choice for some women in the 1970s and 1980s, but it has now simply become a mass behavior.” For a variety of social and economic reasons, women just aren’t that focused on marriage anymore. They don’t have to be.

So why has The Bachelor, a show that presents women as distinctly marriage-crazy, remained so popular? It is now in its 20th season, has been running for fourteen years, and still consistently trends on Twitter when new episodes air. Viewers, who—let’s be honest—are mostly women, can’t seem to get enough.