The Bachelor: Has Anyone Ever Gotten Mono From all the Kissing on the Show?
The Bachelor is one of the most highly-anticipated shows on television. Even though the story plays out in pretty much the same way season after season, fans can’t wait to see how the upcoming Bachelor finds love.
If you’ve never seen an episode of The Bachelor, consider yourself rare. The franchise has become a cult sensation and the fans are extremely (maybe too) invested in the lives of the contestants.
Though the show has normalized falling in love on television, there is one aspect of it all that people are still pretty weirded out by. And that’s all of the kissing!
Peter Weber kissed the most women
The new season of The Bachelor just began and already there has been so much tongue action.
In the Bachelor days of old, the Bachelor would only kiss one or two women on the first night, causing them to be the envy of the rest of the contestants. But now, the leads aren’t holding back and are swapping spit with almost any woman that says she “wants what her parents have.”
“I think I kissed 12 the first night,” Peter Weber told Entertainment Tonight.
“I don’t know why people think it’s weird,” he continued. “I was dating them and I’m someone [and] I feel it, I don’t hold back. There was a lot of instant chemistry and connections. I’ve seen people say, like, it’s weird [and] I’m like, ‘Really? OK.’ I was dating them, you know?”
And some of the women initiated the kisses as well. But Weber thinks that it was all part of finding a serious connection.
“The very first night, I made a very clear point of asking the women to show me the respect that I was showing them [by] letting them know how much this meant to me, and [that] I was taking it so seriously,” he recalled. “I know that this can give you other opportunities — I get that, I’m not naive — but use it for what it’s intended for.”
Has anyone ever gotten sick from all of the kissing?
While watching all of this PDA go down, you have to wonder if any of these people are getting sick from all of the saliva swapping. There are no known reports of contestants coming down with kissing diseases like mono, though.
And as far as other illnesses from being…intimate, those are weeded out before the contestants even come on the show.
During the application process, all of the potential contestants are given STD and STI tests.
“As soon as the medical tests came back, you’d see that herpes was the biggest thing,” Ben Hatta, creator and executive producer Mike Fleiss’s former assistant, told The New York Post. “And sometimes you’d be the first person to tell a contestant that they had herpes. You’d be like, ‘Uh, you should call your doctor.’ Why? ‘We’re not going to be able to have you on our show, but you should call your doctor.’”
“Then they’d realize they’d been denied from ‘The Bachelor’ and now a bunch of people knew they had herpes.”
Weber is probably extremely thankful to production for their thorough testing, as he doesn’t seem to be holding back any of his affection this season.
