Why does The Bachelor casting skew so young?

A short bit of data nerdery today to support my main bugbear with The Bachelor casting.

Why in the world do they cast such young women?

Recently we were given the opportunity to learn about all 28 women cast to vie for Matt Agnew’s heart. Matt is 31 years old, by the way. What stuck out to me was how many bachelorettes have the number ‘2’ in front of their age.

Let’s pull out the numbers:

There are in fact more bachelorettes under the age of 25 (7) than there are over the age of 30 (6). For a Bachelor who’s 31 years old. The average age is 27.4 or, if you’re one of those who prefer medians, it’s 26.5.

As much as we may claim that girls mature faster than boys, once you reach you’re thirties it’s pretty natural that you gravitate towards people in a similar stage of life as you.

This plays out in our Bachelors who have actually had successful relationships. Tim and Anna are the exception here, however. Lightning struck there with a 4-year age difference (out of curiously, I checked the average age of 30 year old Tim’s contestants and it was 27.9, which means they’re maybe moving further away from common sense).

For the Bachelors we’ve actually come to like, coming on the show has generally been a reflection of a genuine desire to settle down (i.e the marriage and babies on this lot!)

Can we really presume that’s likely to happen when a bunch of fame-hungry folks in their early 20s are cast?

Drama is fun, but surely having several genuine possibilities to toss up between is even better?

If nothing else, it’d make the office sweeps more compelling.

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