Post-‘Bachelorette,’ Dorfman finds happiness in ‘Single State of Mind’
NEW YORK — Once you’ve been on “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette,” dating without cameras trailing your every move has got to be easier, right?
Actually, Andi Dorfman says dating in New York is crazier than it was on the ABC reality shows. Considering what she’s been through, that’s saying a lot.
“It’s kind of like a game here,” Dorfman said last month at a coffee shop near her apartment, before the release of her new book, “Single State of Mind.” “I don’t know how many people actually fall in love in New York City.”
Dorfman wasn’t eager to look for a spouse on television, according to her 2016 tell-all, “It’s Not Okay.” But her girlfriends pushed her to go to a casting call, she writes, and suddenly the assistant district attorney was swapping court dates for televised rose ceremonies. Dorfman made it to the final rounds of the 2014 season of “The Bachelor,” eventually dumping former professional soccer player Juan Pablo Galavis for being a self-centered idiot.
A few months later, Dorfman was back on the franchise, calling the shots as the lead on “The Bachelorette,” where she got engaged to former baseball player Josh Murray. She dumped him, too — for being emotionally and verbally abusive.
Now, in “Single State of Mind,” she fashions herself a millennial Carrie Bradshaw. Dorfman, 30, rents an apartment on Perry Street in the West Village, just like Sarah Jessica Parker’s character did in the HBO hit, and is as careful about what to post on Instagram as Bradshaw was about writing her next column.
Once again, according to her new book, Dorfman’s friends started calling many of the shots in her love life — “Bachelor” host Chris Harrison would not be impressed. Dorfman’s first date in New York, after breaking off her engagement, is with a friend’s boyfriend’s co-worker, who shows up to the restaurant late, drunk and high, and flirts with their bartender.
In her post-reality TV life, she’s been propositioned for a threesome while on a private jet, has trekked to Canada for a booty call and has dated men she found attractive “physically but not emotionally or intellectually.”
The singles scene in New York is more unpredictable than “these personaltrainer contestants that come on ‘The Bachelor’ and drink a bunch of protein shakes and say ‘I love you’ all the time,” Dorfman says. “These are legit men with jobs and careers and issues.” On “The Bachelorette,” she was one woman in a sea of 25 men; in New York, she writes, “I’m one woman in a sea of millions.”
So how does this one woman navigate that sea? Dorfman has found dates via Twitter and still lets her friends set her up, within limits. “Each friend gets a voucher. You get one shot,” she said, adding that friends can be terrible matchmakers. She’s sworn off dating apps, even though Harrison has nudged her to join.
If there’s a crash-course on how to survive a bad date, “The Bachelorette” might be it. “It kind of taught me to converse with somebody without having to be in love with them or promise them anything,” Dorfman said.
Echoes of Dorfman’s reality-TV past peek through in this book. You see it in the way she greets one longdistance beau by jumping on him, wrapping her arms and legs around him. You see it in the way she continues to date baseball players. And in the way she occasionally waxes helpless without a man around to change a lightbulb.
What’s interesting about Dorfman’s second book are not just her sexcapades and her post-TV quests for love but her internal struggle to realize she doesn’t need a man to make her happy … or to build her Ikea furniture.
“I find myself in a state of mind where I’m almost rebelling against the entire notion of a relationship. Not in a resentful way but in a liberating way,” Dorfman writes. “Sure, there are times when I’d like to have someone romantically in my life, but then I think about my life as a whole and realize I’m generally happy being alone.”