Who’s Afraid of a Sexy Octogenarian?

When The Bachelor franchise’s long-teased senior spinoff was first introduced to the nation, it was through Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner, a then-71-year-old pickleball-playing widower from Indianapolis. He looked tanned, rested, and ready to find love — something he did for a few months at least when he married Theresa Nist, a spry 70-year-old grandma who loved board games, Hula-Hoops, and romance novels. While both Turner and Nist had that kind of ropy, older-fitness-enthusiast look to them, giving you the impression that they could take most 40-year-olds in a foot race, they were still in their 70s; when they were born, Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House and color TV was still a rarity.

And yet when Bachelor Nation announced its new Golden Bachelorette, it went with 61-year-old Joan Vassos, a private-school administrator from Rockland, Maryland. While Vassos is technically a grandma — she left the first season of The Golden Bachelor to be with her daughter, who was dealing with postpartum depression — she doesn’t exactly give off Golden Girls vibes. With her long blonde highlights, a face that’s undoubtedly familiar with injectables, and four kids who were all born after 1990, you could tell me she was the new 45-year-old hotshot on Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles and I’d buy it. The same goes for the batch of men slated to woo her this season, all of whom are younger than Gerry was during his season. We’re only two seasons into a series pitched to us as “senior citizens go on dates” and already the show is backsliding into late-middle-aged professionals and recent divorcées.

It’s not that people Joan’s age don’t deserve the chance at reality-TV love. But why can’t conventional Bachelor/ette simply make space in its ranks for people in the prime of midlife — who are dating in very similar ways to their 20-something counterparts but with the benefit of a few additional decades of emotional intelligence — and let Golden Bachelor rise to its true potential? Watching two 60-year-olds get a second lease on life together is nice and all, but watching two 80-year-olds doing the same thing just hits differently. (And don’t even get me started on centenarian weddings, because I’ll cry right now.) If ABC insists on marketing this as a show about finding a partner to “share the sunset years of life,” then, at the very least, every participant on the Golden Bachelor should be old enough to draw Social Security, which happens at either 66 or 67. But why stop there? Set a season in a retirement community! Have contestants meet and deal with their significant others’ 55-year-old kids and their bratty 17-year-old grandkids. There’s no reason that producers couldn’t stock a Golden cast full of vibrant, interesting 80-somethings who are fit enough to play 18 holes of golf in the morning before hitting up a happy hour in the clubhouse. There are countless seated-yoga and aqua-aerobics classes full of women looking for a second, third, or fourth chance at true love, and while you could argue that almost no one finds true love on a televised dating show, that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve the chance just because they’re well past retirement age.

In its purest, pie-in-the-sky form, The Golden Bachelor has the potential to be the kind of dating show that brings together an America with a demonstrated interest in retirement-home fit checks and sassy grandmas bragging about their sex lives. There’s a lot of evidence out there that the general population loves heartwarming stories about people at this stage of life, whether they’re co-living or becoming influencers. A true-love story about honest-to-god elderly people would be the kind of emotionally enriching, feel-good television we so rarely get these days, when we’re more likely to learn about them getting scammed than we are about them getting boned — and lest we forget, honest-to-God senior citizens are absolutely, without a doubt still having sex. Countless studies have shown that octogenarians and above are still rounding the bases on the regular. In fact, some report better sex lives than ever, with AARP reporting that it’s not uncommon for women to have their first satisfactory sexual experiences in their 80s, when they finally learn to ask for and get what they really want. (Or when their “bad at sex” first husbands are dead.)

“But what if a sexy super-senior slipped while chatting it up amorously in the hot tub?” you might worry. “Can septuagenarians go on hiking dates and zip around in helicopters?” To which I say, all potential Golden Bachelor seniors are already run through a robust screening process, which can and should include confirming contestants’ physical fitness to be on the show. But also there’s no reason these spinoffs can’t ease up on the physical activity of their predecessors. I’d much rather watch two active seniors enjoy an ice-cream-sundae-making date or a round of miniature golf than I would watch another pair of hot, bland 20-somethings go parasailing or playing touch football. We’ve been there, we’ve done that, and, as an audience, we deserve something new.

If these shows were cast with just a little more rigor, The Golden Bachelor/ette could fill its ranks with people who are not just healthy enough to be insurable but who have lived lives long and varied enough to truly understand who they are and what they want in both life and love. And as viewers, watching a 61-year-old administrator get fresh with some similarly aged finance guy just can’t offer the same sort of serotonin zing that you get from seeing two 84-year-olds hold hands for the first time. That’s the Golden Bachelorette I want to watch, captions on, as I eat dinner at 4:30 p.m.