You may be aware of the fine television program known as The Bachelor. My fiancé introduced me, and although I approached with skepticism, I cannot deny – it is damn entertaining.

For the uninitiated: This is a reality TV show wherein dozens of women compete for the heart of the titular “Bachelor” (this year, it was Nick Viall). As the show progresses, women are eliminated until only one remains, at which point the Bachelor and his chosen get engaged and, barring unforeseen circumstances, get married. It’s a strange way to select your betrothed, but the stakes are high nonetheless.

Something else was strange about the show: the way contestants would speak about their blossoming relationships. Specifically, I was amused at how often the word “connection” was used. A few examples:

“We had an instant connection…”

“I’m worried that the connections he has with some of the other girls are stronger than ours…”

“I know he feels the connection we have, too…”

I realized that I could put to work my propensity for data and make a novel contribution to Bachelor Nation. I could record every mention of the word “Connection” in Season 21 of The Bachelor. So I did that:

I hypothesized that “connection” usage would correlate with the strength of the relationships on the show, and that was largely proven out by the data. We see that “connections” were weak to start, peaked during episodes 2-4, and then usage diminished after that.

Of course, this analysis is incomplete; I need to bring in the other recorded key word: “love“.

And now you can see where I am going with this. Clearly, as the Bachelor progresses, the strength of the many relationships is increasing. My question is, as always: how can we quantify that? I guessed that the frequency in usage of certain affection-indicating key words would be an accurate predictor of relationship strength. (I should write love poetry.) And so I thought it would be interesting to keep track of how often the words “love” and “connection” were used throughout the Bachelor.

I want to share a few thoughts on my favorite word, “connection”. It is adorably tentative, and awkwardly imprecise for describing human relationships. And it’s therefore the perfect word for the notoriously awkward courting rituals of the Bachelor. I make fun of it, but – in the defense of the show’s participants – what word are they supposed to use instead?

Like any relationship, people are preoccupied with when they should use the word “love”. “Connection”, therefore, is a welcome and appropriate alternative – and an interesting word to monitor for assessing relationships in their early stage. And lo, there is a clear inverse relationship between usage between “connection” and “love”; as relationships grow stronger, the contestants increasingly forego “connection” in favor of “love”.

“Connection” and “love” are both indicators of relationship strength, so we can consider both to assess Nick’s budding romance(s). Here is the same data stacked, so you can see total usage of both terms over time:

Each episode of The Bachelor reflects approximately 1 week, and therefore episode is a useful stand-in for time. As time goes by, contestants are increasingly likely to use the word “love” to describe their relationships, as opposed to “connection”. Here is the same data as a percent of total usage:

There’s a push and pull dynamic going on between the bizarre courtship scenario of The Bachelor (it’s weird to date the same man concurrently with dozens of other women!) which may make women reluctant to say they are in love, and the pressure implicit in the strict 10 week (at most!) timeline which may encourage women to say they are in love – perhaps before they would be otherwise comfortable. But I think it is safe to say that the number of concurrent relationships has an impact on the progression of love. Indeed, “love” does not overtake “connection” in usage until episode 6 when the number of women has been reduced by 70%. Below you can see the number of contestants by episode:

Episode* Number of Contestants 1 30 2 22 3 18 4 15 5 13 6 9 7 6 8 4 9 3 10 2

In conclusion: First comes connection, then comes love, then comes…hopefully?…marriage. 🙂

I would like to make some comments about my methodology, and related topics:

The * next to “episode” is meant to indicate that I had to slightly modify data collection around the final few episodes. The reason for this was, aired episodes 9 & 10 were only one hour each (half normal run-time), and so these were combined for data collection purposes to be “episode 9”. Aired episode 11, the “Women Tell All” episode, was not counted, nor was episode 13, “After the Final Rose”, as these were not relevant to the relationship progression timeline. Episode 12 is counted as “episode 10”.

I recorded each utterance of the tracked word to the best of my ability, but as I am a mortal human man, it is possible I have missed some occurrences.

During data collection I did consider the context of the word usage, especially in the case of “love”, as there are many common circumstances for using this word in a way that does not relate back to any ongoing relationships on the show. For example, “I love you mom” and “I love this song” did not get counted as valid.

One obvious improvement to the data that I could aspire to make – WHO said each utterance of connection / love? Obviously that would be very interesting, but it was daunting from a data collection perspective – maybe next time.

I hope you found this interesting! Maybe you are merely bemused that someone actually took the time to do this. I’ll take that as a success, too. I plan to continue to do this with each season of the Bachelor and Bachelorette – so wait with bated breath for that. Other words and phrases that I may elect to track include “process”, “relationship”, “one on one”, “chemistry”, “going home”, “attraction”, and “here for the right reasons”.