The Bachelor hometown dates: Arie Luyendyk faces pressure from MANY fathers

Bachelor premiere

Are you ready for The Bachelor hometown dates to be here? On the other side of crying and Arie Luyendyk Jr. staring into space at the conclusion of tonight’s episode, it’s coming up next week.

So what’s actually coming up? In comparison to some of the craziness that we’ve seen on past seasons, maybe you can argue that these hometown dates don’t look all that bad. Sure, pretty much every father is skeptical of Arie (does Tia’s dad threaten him? Maybe jokingly so), but that’s standard-operating procedure with a show like this.

What was a little bit more of a surprise, at least to us, was getting a chance to see Arie play around with Kendall Long’s taxidermy collection. You have to be REALLY into someone to play around with some stuffed once-living animals. Not our speed.

At the end of this episode Arie will of course choose between Kendall, Tia Booth, Lauren Burnham, and Becca Kurfin to go to the overnight dates part of the show. Given that she was the last person picked tonight, we’re the most worried for Tia — also, she’s in Arkansas and with that, there’s a reasonably good chance that her family is the most conservative and therefore different from any other that Arie has come across during the hometown dates. We saw this before with Ben Flajnik where a hometown date seemed to sour him on one of the contenders. It could come about again here, but we’re making pretty broad assumptions.

We are pretty confident of this: If we were going to get a major dose of hometown-date awkwardness like we did with Desiree Hartsock’s brother during Sean Lowe’s season, it would have been shown off in the preview. ABC is not going to sit on footage that they consider to be gold on this level. We know that this preview was a little bit shorter due to the Bachelor Winter Games hype, but we still believe it.

What do you think is coming on The Bachelor hometown dates? Share in the comments below right now! Also, like CarterMatt on Facebook to get some more insight on The Bachelor now. (Photo: ABC.)

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