Last week I had a serious battle going with jet lag. Falling asleep by nine or ten o’clock at night and waking at three or four is not my normal pattern. My preference always was to “party until dawn” and sleep in until late morning, but perhaps those days are over. Even this week, my internal clock supplied an automatic wake up call before five. The good news is that, for the first time ever, I actually am doing some form of exercise before heading to the office.

The biggest challenge with taking a vacation or extended work trip and then dealing with this “early to bed and early to rise” business is that I got way behind on TV watching. The DVR was loaded with two-plus weeks of recorded television shows. Thankfully, as of Monday, I finally caught up on missed episodes of The Bachelorette.

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This season of The Bachelorette has been an interesting one. It marks the first time that the bachelorette herself and the network have openly shared that she had sex with one of the bachelors halfway into the season. On top of that, the optional night in the “fantasy suite” with each of the three remaining bachelors took place before the “home visits” to the bachelors’ families. Was that to test sexual compatibility before involving parents and siblings in the race to the final rose?

In this day and age, let’s be honest about sex. Are we surprised that “hanky panky” is going on behind closed doors and under the covers? Is there anything wrong with Kaitlyn acknowledging and acting upon chemistry-induced lust? (Have you seen some of those men???) Would you want your daughter to marry someone she never slept with first?

In my opinion, reality TV just got a little more real.

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So why am I still watching The Bachelorette after all of these years? Huffington Post’s “Why Smart Women Watch (And Love) ‘The Bachelor’” helps sums it up pretty well. Here are my reasons:

• I can’t resist a good old-fashioned romance. The beautiful roses, the creative dates, the exotic honeymoon-like backdrops, the gorgeously set and blinding diamond ring, and the down-on-one-knee proposal are still wonderful elements of the ultimate fairy tale. Wouldn’t we all want this to be our story of “happily ever after”? (I cry at the end of every season.)

• I love the cattiness and drama along the way. There’s always the guy or girl in the house that no one likes; the crying in the departing limo; and the jealousies that surface between the suitors. They all are like the proverbial train wreck that we can’t tear our eyes from. (I can’t even imagine being fought or cried over!)

• The show is a mindless guilty pleasure that can cheer me up in the privacy of my own home after a blah weekend or a tough Monday at work. (Right up there with reading the new “Grey” book!)

• I enjoy living vicariously. Leaving my husband completely out of this discussion, I love getting a weekly glimpse of what it could be like to date and fall in love in today’s world. (Though, if I really were to become single again, I would be at a total loss as to how to make this happen.)

• But, perhaps most importantly, the idea and the possibility that someone can find true love – on a television show over a three-month period – somehow gives me hope for the future.

We need more romance and passion in our lives. We need more love and happiness in our world.

Good luck, Kaitlyn.