It's not unusual for women to be pitted against one another on The Bachelor. As fun as the series can be, the reality is that the whole format of the show is about stirring up drama amongst women as they compete over the same man. This season, there are sadly multiple pairs of women fighting, and unfortunately Colton just made the Caelynn and Hannah B. fight worse — and it was seriously hard to watch.
Hannah and Caelynn have history outside the show, which the series wasted basically no time in highlighting. Both women competed at Miss USA 2018, and while Caelynn came in second, Hannah didn't place. It seems that the competition led to the former friends having a falling out, but now they're back competing against one another once again. And while the Bachelor producers are clearly the driving force between their onscreen fallout, Colton isn't exactly keeping the peace either.
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After some encouragement from a fellow contestant, Hannah decided to confront Colton about her past with Caelynn. In confessions and conversations with the other women, Hannah has been pretty straightforward when talking about Caelynn. "It totally scares me for Colton ... she’s fake," Hannah said in Episode 2. But when it came time to tell Colton, Hannah fumbled over what she was saying and left him more confused than ever.
"I was just in a high stress situation with her … in a hostile environment," Hannah told him. Colton started to pry for more information. "Is she mean? Manipulative? Fake?" he asked. Hannah declined to comment on any specifics, instead vaguely simply that if Colton was interested in Caelynn, then he couldn't also be interested in her — because they are just that different.
Colton left the conversation visibly frustrated and sought Caelynn out immediately for her side of the story. She also didn't provide much information. Caelynn only said, "We were in a competitive environment and we handle competition differently," before she began to cry. Colton's response to that was to get the group date rose, which he promptly bestowed upon Caelynn. He may have been trying to cheer her up, but all Colton did was basically announce, quite clearly, that he chose a side — and it wasn't Hannah's.
As if it wasn't bad enough that the two women were already pitted against one another by the show's producers, now Colton is participating. Hannah naturally felt awful afterwards, worried that she'd messed up her chances, and even Caelynn was upset because the drama of the whole situation clearly felt so awful that it overshadowed the joy of getting group date rose anyway.
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This was always going to be a lose-lose situation for Hannah — no one on The Bachelor has ever been successful when they've tattled on a fellow contestant. Every time a contestant (on The Bachelor or Bachelorette) chooses this path, it just serves to communicate to the Bachelor or Bachelorette that their attention is elsewhere and that they're more involved in drama than a potential relationship.
But, while we've seen this situation go poorly in the past, this version of events went even worse than before. And unfortunately, that's on Colton. What started as a bad situation got even worse when he decided to use his rose to resolve the situation, and, intentionally or not, essentially picked a winner. And as their reactions clearly showed, in reality, both Hannah and Caelynn were on the losing side of that move.