The Bachelor Season 24, episode 9 spoiled recap: Intimacy issues

Victoria’s FSD

Victoria and Peter take a helicopter ride to a National Park and decide to go explore a waterfall. In a voiceover, we hear Peter explain that everything about his relationship with Victoria is great – except their ability to communicate with one another. Gee whiz, Peter, that’s kind of … the most important thing? It’s clear to literally everyone else that his relationship with Victoria is not great.

Every single one of their conversations is basically:

Peter: Hey, how is your day?

Victoria: I don’t think you like me.

He says his priority tonight is going to be having important conversations with her. We look forward to this episode’s edition of cry and fight about nothing!

Back at the hotel, Madi and Hannah Ann talk about Madi’s sexpectations. It’s clear that Madi is more comfortable with Hannah Ann than she is with Victoria. We haven’t seen any sort of tension between the two so we’re not sure where it is coming from. Perhaps Victoria is more outwardly sexual or something so it adds an extra layer of awkward for Madi? Or maybe she and Hannah Ann are just closer? It’s a mystery, much like everything this season.

Hannah Ann expresses her frustration that Madi’s stance could affect her own relationship and calls it madness. It’s nice to see our sentiments echoed through the television.

Peter and Victoria sit down for dinner and Victoria tries to explain her…behavior to Peter. Her perfectly reasonable explanation is that she isn’t used to being asked about her feelings in her past relationships. We will say, if the alleged homewrecking stuff is true, dating married men seems like a great way to avoid catching feelings.

Victoria asks him to spell out what he wants from her, and Peter says he needs confidence in knowing he can always count on and lean on her. Again, we are by no means Peter stans, but it seems like it’s pretty clear he just wants to have a normal conversation with her where no one storms off in tears.

Further, it seems pretty clear that he’s being pretty clear about exactly that. He pushes her to talk about why she didn’t feel good enough in her last relationship and says he wants her to know that she does deserve love, but she closes up and tries to avoid the conversation by complaining that she doesn’t know what he wants. We, too, avoid talking about our feelings at all costs, but we didn’t go on a show that is ostensibly about feelings, so…

The conversation doesn’t really resolve (another chapter in this fun pattern), but Peter’s Peter has had its sights set on Victoria since day one, so they head to the fantasy suite regardless. It almost seems like Victoria was testing his limits, like when Jed chose to pick a fight about Luke P. on his fantasy suite dinner with Hannah B.

It’s becoming painfully clear that the Bachelor producers really wanted Madison to break down as they continued probing her with ever-increasing girl chats. We’re not sure if this is better or worse than flying her dad in to say she shouldn’t go through with it? Perhaps a pastor to lecture her on her virtue à la Gilmore Girls?

Victoria and Peter’s night of stimulating ‘conversation’ seems like it went well, and she says she is in love with him. We took notice of the fact that we were shown Victoria’s morning-after with Pete, but were not privy to Hannah Ann’s pillow talk. Perhaps we’re being led to see a certain narrative, or perhaps not. Much like Reality Steve, we remain in the dark on anything past the Women Tell All.

Wash (the sheets), rinse, repeat – Victoria returns to the nightmare lair, and awkwardly joins Madi and Hannah Ann’s conversation. This 112th chat ends with Madi (obviously) becoming uncomfortable and walking away. We can’t imagine this will affect her date with Peter in any way!