Welcome to our Thursday recap of The Bachelor — you can read Sinead Stubbin’s excessively funny Power Ranking from Wednesday here.

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Love: what is it? Some say it’s a fundamental part of the human condition, something we all need and crave. Others say its just surging chemicals and hormones in our horrible meat-bodies. Some say its an old witch’s curse.

We might never know.

But, some of us will never stop searching for answers. The Badgelor is one of those people, and the seething mass of Bachelorettes cooped up in his mansion with only champagne and spite to live off are others. And maybe I am too.

So, we’re going to see what lessons we can learn about romance from The Bachelor, because I guess watching a room full of starved savage blonde women compete for the love of a time-travelling dad from the seventies is better than like… dating.

As Osher says: “When it comes to falling in love, spending time together is really important isn’t it.” So wise.

1. Strike Fear In The Heart Of Your Quivering Date

Here’s the thing, I don’t understand who or what The Honey Badger is. I know his name is Nick Cummins, and I know he was a football player. But I don’t understand him. He is a wild-eyed mop of insane energy, absolutely brimming with strange arcane sayings that haven’t been heard since that ship full of confused fathers was lost in the Bermuda Triangle all those years ago. I am scared of him.

Gosh what a muscular-necked healthy boy he is, all milk and hair, a big old moustache that tromps around on giant thighs. I can’t work out if the straight women are attracted to him, or just want him to lift a couch above his head and throw it into the ocean like a carnival strong man.

So, it comes as no surprise that his first date with a woman on this episode is taking her high into the air on a helicopter — which she is specifically scared of — then throwing her into the water.

“She’s as nervous as a bag of cats at a greyhound meet,” says the Badgechelor, before holding her in his veiny arms and rappelling into the ocean.

His date is named Shannon, and she’s a “car care consultant”??? The Badger is impressed at how gracefully she responded to being thrown out of a helicopter, saying she that is a “very grounded soul”, which is now literal.

Later, he forces her to eat fish, which she also doesn’t like. But she gave it a go, because this is the first lesson: love is about doing something you are both scared of and find abhorrent, choking down that slimy mass of barely cooked FEELING.

2. Compliment Your Date, You Absolute Goon

“She looks tippy-top,” says the Badgelor. “She got these shoes that look like she stepped on two white rabbits and just kept going.”

This is a compliment.

“She’s a beautiful smiley thing,” he says, referring to Shannon again, who he seems to have forgotten is a human woman.

“Cass… how good’s she looking today, she’s *Police Academy Noise Guy noises for 2 minutes*.

3. Establish A Connection With An Odd Story That Goes Nowhere

“I was seconds to being bloody brown bread,” starts the Badger. “Dead.”

He is using rhyming slang, because he is a husky boy haunted by the ghost of a cockney geezer who was murdered by a football.

“So, I fang into the tea room,” he continues, and then rounds out the story by sharing his inability to understand how instant coffee is absorbed into liquid. And that’s why he doesn’t drink instant coffee.

Now, from a creative writing perspective, I thought that story was not only unimpressive, but a signifier of poor judgement, both in chowing down on raw instant coffee AND choosing to share this anecdote with a potential sexual partner.

But Shannon loves this nothing story.

“That is SUCH a good story, oh my god.”

I am learning so much.

4. Expose All Your Perverted Kinks On National Television

For the first group date, the Badgerman forces all the girls he has chosen to dress up as his “four passions”. They are:

1. Being in a rock band
2. Preventing forest fires
3. Sexy school girls
4. Yoga

Clearly, these are the only four things that he can get off to, that’s just science. Once someone on a cop show explained who Freud was, and from memory he had some pretty hot theories about sexy murdering.

So, even though I truly expected the police and the FBI to arrive and arrest this 30-year-old man for making a bunch of young women dress up like school girls for his own gratification on a nationally syndicated phenomenon, they did not.

So, I have learned that heterosexual dating culture not only allows this sort of thing, it’s encouraged.

5. If You Don’t Know How To Kiss, Just Pretend And Then Lie About It

Badgey took a woman named Romy on a single date, to his uncle’s pizzeria, because he’s a good chunky boy who loves to give his family free promotion for their restaurants.

Romy is a lot of things — but she’s definitely not there to make friends. She also 100% and conclusively DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO KISS.

At the end of the pizza date, she leaned in for a kiss with the ham-sized Bachelor. From the outside, it looked like she missed, and absolutely went full hog on his ear instead. Awkward, we all thought, she missed!

But no — back at the harem, she confidently told the rest of the women that she’d “had a really romantic kiss.”

“It wasn’t tacky, it wasn’t forced, it was an organic, authentic, like kiss,” she continues. “It was a great kiss. It was a REAL kiss.”

So, the lesson here is that if you’re a 29-year-old woman who doesn’t quite understand the mechanics of kissing, just get in there and slobber up one side of the Bachelor’s big handsome face and then tell everyone that it was a passionate session of making out, and not like a Labrador finding spilled beef broth on the floor.

6. Don’t Be The Pale, Melted Version Of All The Other Contestants

At the Rose Ceremony, we said goodbye to two women who probably have names, but we’ll never know what they are, because they are gone.

Their sin? Looking like literally every other blonde contestant on the show, except slightly melted, like a Madame Tussauds wax figure flown too close to the sun by Elon Musk on another one of his insane science pranks.

The Bachelor is on every Wednesday and Thursday nights from now until when we all die. Junkee will be recapping them all.

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Patrick Lenton is an author and staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.