Marie Kondo could not clean up this mess. Brené Brown could not teach it vulnerability or empathy; she certainly couldn’t teach teach Luke P how to harness his shame because God completely forgot to give him any when they were talking in that shower.
Queer Eye’s Karamo himself could not sit Hannah down in the passenger seat of a Dodge Durango and make her understand that she correlates struggle with love to a damaging degree, and that there are simply some arenas in where that which doesn't kill you…just doesn't kill you, but super seems like he—I mean it—might if given the opportunity. (For the record, nor could Tan France make these men stop wearing light gray summer suits in snowy Eastern Europe.)
No, I don't think even Netflix, with its almighty power, could create a reality show specifically calibrated with behavioral psychologists, Christian theologians, and the one ENT doctor in the world who specializes in mouth-breathing in order to make Luke P and Hannah see that their "relationship" is irredeemable trash.
Because they both seem to be existing under this shared delusion that "fighting for a relationship" is not only a good thing, but an aspirational quality to have in the defining coupling of your life. This seems to be a common motivation in the Bachelor world, I guess, because many of the Bachelor(ette) leads feel that they've been given up on — as they are, by definition, losers.
Everyone who starts as a new franchise lead has just been unceremoniously dumped after completing the "I'm crazy for you / I'm falling in love with you / I love you / I'm in love with you" progression. But the weird thing about Hannah is she never mentions Colton. From the moment he broke up with her, she seemed pretty okay with it. So where does this understanding that it is a show of weakness to quit a relationship where the main exchanges are "you're my dream girl, but here are all the things wrong with you" and "I see good inside of you, but here are all the bad things I see on the outside" come from?
Like…love should have conditions, right? And those conditions should be not manipulating someone into oblivion just to win a game, right???
With each new time Luke lies, and mouth-breathes, and "honestly, like, honestly Hannah, like with all sincerity, I'm being complete genuine here"s at Hannah, I feel like I'm getting second-hand gaslighting. Which, as we all know, carries 20 to 30 percent of the negative effects of firsthand gaslighting. It's making me feel insane, so I can only imagine how it's making Hannah feel.
But Hannah seems to equate that feeling of insanity with passion. And while I've never fully bought into the fairy tale aspect of The Bachelorette—fairy tales do not include stucco, and it is my firm belief that Bachelor mansion will one day be haunted by its very own Bent Neck Lady (Clare Crawley, duh)—I've also never bought into it as reality either. But this right here…
This is too real, my dudes.
Here is living, breathing, nationally televised proof that even the coolest, most superior of women can be sidelined by some mediocre dude that she believes has hidden depths that only she can uncover deep down under his meaty layer of flannel-clad mediocrity…
But he doesn't. He never does.
Hannah is one of the best Bachelorettes we've ever had: she's funny, she's horny, she speaks like a cross stitch in your grandmother's kitchen about love, unless she's mad, in which case she speaks with a terror reserved solely for My Super Sweet 16 teens who just got the wrong Lexus on their birthday. She's just a raw nerve, and that gives us a lot of access to exactly what she's feeling most of the time. But Hannah's feelings for Luke are simply inexplicable.
And who among us has not looked at one of our hot, amazing friends and been like: WHAT does she see in that guy? Every friend I have deserves to be married to a Jake Gyllenhaal or above, these are just the facts. And I consider Hannah a friend. That means this 7th Heaven late-season-Lucy-boyfriend lookin' ass wannabe just isn't gonna cut it.
After Colton dumped her, Hannah determined that she wanted to be loved by a man fiercely and every day. Those are very rousing statements that I can fully imagine any number of Christian-affiliated campus outreach leaders telling me on a gender-separated retreat when I was 19. And they're not exactly bad ideas…
Until you encounter someone like Luke. Because the opposite of indifference (Colton) is not force (Luke P) — it's care (Tylerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…sorry I started daydreaming on my keyboard).
And there's nothing careful about Luke P and the way he swears to Hannah that he's going to change for her, doesn't change, and then tells her she must have misunderstood what he said in the first place. The worst part is, he's not even smart enough for his carelessness to be malicious, it's just instinctual idiocy. The man is Wreck-It-Ralph in gym shorts, and he will not stop until he either wins Hannah or demolishes her (per the season preview, instead of physical destruction, Luke's meaty fists wield only paternalistic righteousness and slut-shaming).
Hannah says she wants to be loved fiercely, and I get it; that sounds really romantic. For, like…a few months. And then it's just exhausting. Does that make me sound old? Well I am old, and I've learned some shit [ed. note: okay, mostly from television shows…okay, OTHER television shows]. Fighting for a relationship and loving fiercely are for when someone fucks up the established relationship and needs to make it right, not for the moment the bread basket arrives on the third date. That is too early to be fighting for the relationship! Hannah and Luke are living that Lemonade lifestyle before they even dipped their toes into Dangerously In Love.
And speaking of: there is a reason Sasha Fierce is Beyoncé's alter ego. You can't be fierce all the time! Eventually, someone has to do the dishes. (I mean, Beyoncé doesn't have to do the dishes, but she has to hire someone to do the dishes.)
And if there's anything I've learned from my married friends, it's that your spouse is going to load the dishwasher differently than you, and that fact is going to annoy you until the day you die, so you should aim to find a spouse who compliments you in every single other way so that you don't murder them the 3,452nd time you have to flip the spoons right side up or switch the bowls to the slanted slats because you're not a fucking idiot…
In Luke P, Hannah has found a person who does exactly two things well: makes her hot in the undercarriage, and talks about his lord and shower-savior Jesus Christ. A combination so irresistible to her that it overrides the fact that every single other thing he does—lie, try to control her, gaslight her, wear flannel to formal dates—to show over and over again that he does not respect her. The best thing Hannah has going for her, but also the most frustrating thing, is that she recognizes the bad, and willfully chooses to reframe it as something they can work through if Luke can just choose to be a better version of himself. Very obviously, there is no other version because Luke himself sees nothing wrong with his behavior.
And, listen: what's happening right here, with me ranting about Luke P for the first half of this recap is exactly the problem! Hannah is going to ditch the dork eventually, that much has been clear since the first season preview where someone—who could it be, I wonder who—tries to shame her for having sex (as we now know, in a windmill…twice…minimum). Nonetheless, the longer he stays, and the more time she invests in their doomed relationship, the less she can invest with all the other stone cold hotties that are trying to marry her.
NOTE: This recap covers through episode 7 in Latvia — the episode that aired this week will be included in the next ‘cap!
I mean, Connor is out here just quietly being 6'6 with the face of Christian Bale as Laurie in Little Women and that deviated-septum-rich-boy voice of a sentient lacrosse stick, and the man can't get a breath of attention. Like, Dustin is a man who is somehow pulling off a nose ring and I swear I had never heard his voice until he got kicked off the show. And these are just the guys who were always destined to be Bachelor In Paradise fodder anyway…
This is to say nothing of the frontrunners who Hannah can't give her full energy to because Luke keeps making her so mad she has to cancel all the Cocktail Parties. I don't even have to explain the vast distance between the worst and best of Hannah's men to you, because they've done it for me:
In the photos above, Luke is screaming about himself to mimic human emotion and Tyler is just talking about one of the many things he admires about Hannah. Eventually, we will have to go back to Luke, but for now, let's talk about perhaps the best thing to ever happen to The Bachelorette:
TYLER C: BOYFRIEND. DANCER. FEMINIST.
I'd love to set the scene by simply listing The Awful Things I Would Do To Simply Be Given the Chance To Put My Whole Palm On Any Part Of Tyler C, Including His Mind:
Shave off one of my eyebrows
Shave off both of my eyebrows
Eat a roll of toilet paper
Use a particularly long CVS receipt in place of toilet paper for up to three (3) days
Give up my Chick-Fil-A One™ Red Member status
Learn to parallel park
Invest more soundly in my financial future
Learn what Orange Theory is instead of just using it as a cultural reference point
Drink white wine out of a coffee mug like a blogger on TV
Change my driver's license from the state I haven't lived in for seven years
Move states
Move mountains
Follow a professional nemesis on Instagram
Participate in one of those paint-and-sip classes that make me feel sort of existential sadness I can’t explain any time I see photo evidence of one
Ditto an escape room
Tyler is like a healing salve, the complete opposite of Luke P: a romantic hero the likes of which we have never seen on the Bachelor franchise. He has that same indefinable marble-mouth accent as Ryan Gosling who is from Canada but also maybe the Bronx, whereas Tyler is from Florida but also maybe…Delaware? I don't know, but while the Noah-from-The-Notebook comparisons are obvious, Tyler is no archetype.
He's not trying to make Hannah see that he can be passionate or love her fiercely or whatever—he just shows her. (He does, for the record, have big "get in the water" energy.)
As he tells Hannah, he just knows who he is now, and that means he's ready to fight to be the best version of himself in a relationship. He wants to support her not because boyfriends are supposed to be supportive, but because he wants Hannah to be happy, and that means sometimes—I think, a lot of times for Hannah—she'll need to share her burdens. On their first one-on-one, she's basically crying when he arrives because the night before the two Lukes got into an argument over Luke P body-slamming Luke S during the group date rugby game.
Hannah is apologetic for not being able to just be happy, but Tyler tells her not to worry about it: they'll get through it together. Then they catch lobsters and he makes a bunch of dad jokes about her not getting lost in his eyes, and eventually, she's happy again. Hannah admits that she held back from him a little at first because she assumed he was a player, and I get it. Tyler is so hot—impossibly hot. You gotta protect yourself from a man whose DMs probably look like an Instagram contest for a free Anthropologie couch.
But it’s clear that Tyler respects Hannah and just really likes the person that she is; he relays those feelings often, and with too much embarrassing gusto to be lying.
We've already heard him tell Hannah about how she gave him a feeling akin to running out of the football tunnel when he first got out of the limo and saw her. In the most recent episode, Tyler tells her that he had another moment that "kind of shook me, freaked me out," when she walked into a Cocktail Party that she later left weeping because Luke P’s arguing with the other men upset her so much.
"You were wearing all white, I mean you looked heaven-sent, you were like an angel. And I pray to got you're my angel,” Tyler tells her. “And later on, like you held it down between all of us, just stood there and fought. You had this look on your face where you were just all business and I was like that's what I want."
And you guys…this is where I got emotional to a degree I am not proud to admit. "At the house, I want that—'cause you're gonna have kids and you're gonna have things you have to stand up for and fight for. Where did this fighter in you come from because I adore it—"
That is when Hannah just mounts him like a SoulCycle bike and begins making out with his face. He has just told her that the thing he finds hottest about her is imagining her standing up for their future children, and I truly believe he meant it, even if it was basically a one-way ticket to the future bone zone. Tyler likes Hannah's passion not because men are supposed to like strong women now, but because he sees the role that it plays in her life.
It's insane, absolutely insane, to imagine that Hannah has Tyler in front of her and could still be fighting to make it work with Luke.
PILOT PETE PERFORMS
And Hannah doesn’t even think Tyler is her hottest boyfriend!!! I mean, objectively, she probably understands that a general contractor who is also a signed model who both played football and was on the debate team at Wake Forest where he earned his MBA and was two classes away from a Dance minor is quite the catch…but physically, she cannot keep her inner thighs off of Peter, a Precious Moments doll with a pilot's license.
And I love that. It is simply the best case scenario for a viewing public made up of us normals that a women could be faced with an entire football team worth of CW stars, and instead choose to have the hots for the one and only Wiggle.
It's even more baffling because Peter has no game to speak of. Don’t get me wrong, the man is extremely cute, but their chemistry is not derived from skill, but rather, raw talent. During a group date, Peter decides that he wants to make out with Hannah on a pool table, which is much easier thought than done. First he has to casually clear all the balls off the table in the middle of their game, then he has to lift Hannah up on the table, during which time he knocks her head on an overhead light, so he has to reset, and then lift her up again, laying her down more carefully this time, and then he has to climb up on the pool table and start making out with her.
When Peter and Hannah go on a spa date on their one-on-one, after two Latvian people beat them up with branches for a while, they head into a sauna.
The Latvians quickly hit the road, however, when they realize boners are about to start flying.
And things get…graphic. Now, I went to a sauna recently and I simply could not stop marveling at all the places on my body that I didn't even know until that moment could produce sweat—the backs of my hands! my shins! my outer hips! I do not recall, while sweat streamed down my earlobes, thinking that I would like to have another person touch me. I was mostly trying to remember to breathe. But with their last dying breath, I do believe that Hannah and Peter would choose to dry hump, and I must respect them for that.
Once again, it is simply impossible to imagine that Hannah could have as much chemistry as she does with Peter, and still be fighting for her relationship with Luke, the physical manifestation of my earlobe sweat.
DROP DEAD JED
Listen, we'll cover Jed in full next time, but here are the facts: on their one-on-one date, Jed confessed to Hannah that he originally came on The Bachelorette for exposure as a singer/songwriter, but once he met her, it all became real, and now he is truly developing feelings for. Hannah loves this because she is also developing feelings for him, and because it seems like a dangerously honest thing to do to confess that you came on the show for The Wrong Reasons…
The only reason a person would do that is because they're there for The Right Reasons and can really imagine getting engaged to Hannah at the end of this and want to start off on an honest foundation…
RIGHT???
Here's what Jed didn't mention in The Bachelor franchise's first ever admission in 30 plus collective seasons of coming on the show for the exposure: Jed had a girlfriend before he came on The Bachelorette.
Not like a-couple-dates-girlfriend…like a serious went-on-vacation-together, met-each-other's-families, kissed-her-goodbye-the-day-he-flew-to-L.A. girlfriend. That girlfriend is also an aspiring a musician, so she went along with this plan for him to go on the show and get some exposure, with the understanding that when he came back, they would still be dating.
I'm sure this happens more than we realize, and I don’t even find it that offensive. The Bachelorette is not some sacred entity that shan't be desecrated with false intentions.
You hear over and over again that people go on the show not expecting anything to happen, and for a handful of people each season, something happens. It's not so shocking that Jed could have thought he'd be able to go on the show, fake it a little with Hannah, and then return home to his girlfriend with a couple hundred thousand more Instagram followers. It's not great that he then developed feelings for Hannah while knowing he had another woman back home who actively thought she was his girlfriend. But even in the real world, sometimes you meet the right person at the wrong time…
No, the worst thing Jed did was ghost his OG (original girlfriend) when he got back home, which is not only a shitty thing to do, but means he almost certainly didn't tell Hannah about said girlfriend at any point while they were falling in love with each other.
Which makes his one act of seemingly brave honesty from earlier in the season seem all the more contrived! Not to mention, the man sings or plays an instrument throughout the entire Latvia episode, stone cold showing up outside Hannah's window with a guitar, and then coming up to her room to play her an original song her wrote for her in bed. Hannah does not seem to find any disconnect between Jed saying he's no longer there for exposure as a musician and his constant musical performances.
Our only solace is that Jed is not a particular prodigious musician so, he's not going to get the kind of exposure he was aiming for in this; he's just getting…exposed.
And we're getting played because that's two out of the guaranteed Top 4 dudes that we actively can't root for.
[Ed. note: At this newsletter, we recognize one future Bachelor, and that Bachelor is Mike, with an assist from the first ever televised Bachelor durag. Please do not take his lack of mention as a frontrunner as a lack of endorsement—official campaign to be launched in next week's newsletter, including a series of unwanted text messages direct to your phone asking for donations.]
ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES A JACKASS
Luke is the living, mouth-breathing reason for the Maya Angelou quote: When people show you who they are—believe them.
Per Oprah, Mz. Angelou spoke these words advice to her because Oprah was stressing out over a man's behavior even though that man had repeatedly shown hr that his behavior was never going to change. You guys…
Oprah.
OPRAH.
OoooooppppppprrrrrraaaaaaaH.
This is simply a lesson Oprah—Oprah!—had to learn (from Maya Angelou).
And it's a lesson Hannah will have to learn as well; she will simply have to do it on television while a nation silently screams at her, HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THIS?!
Hannah likes Luke. And Luke wants Hannah. And it's a lot easier for Hannah to convince herself that her initial assessment wasn’t entirely incorrect, and there is some deep goodness hidden inside of Luke that only she can see and draw out, than it is to admit that she just got this one wrong and that Luke has been showing her exactly who he is from the moment he stalked her around a cocktail party after she explicitly told him to give her some space.
Then Luke P bodyslammed a slender, unassuming man named Luke S on the sidelines of a rugby game. Some of the other men saw it, some of them didn't, but they all agreed that Luke P is aggressive and unhinged enough to do this. When asked, they all told Hannah as much.
Except Luke P, who told Hannah that he didn't want to say anything about it, but he actually thinks Luke S is here for The Wrong Reasons, and that he only bodyslammed Luke S because Luke S—the house's other main Wiggle—was charging at him with clenched fists. This is very obvious bullshit, which Luke S later denies, but that only confuses Hannah more. She pulls a Colton-patented move where she's like "Okay, you guys argue in front of me and I'll decide who's right—oh wait, it's super annoying to watch people argue, I'll just leave in the middle of this argument, more frustrated than I was before."
Luke S ends up eliminating himself when it's clear Hannah isn't catching onto the way Luke P is manipulating her, and Hannah chooses to give Luke P a rose so that she can get to the bottom of this with a one-on-one date. She knows she had an instant connection with Luke P, but she's bothered by the fact that no one seems to like him, a thing she hilariously will not stop saying to him.
I believe Hannah's desperation to validate her feelings for Luke are twofold: as previously stated, she doesn’t want her initial instinct about him to be wrong (recall that he got the First Impression Rose, which has determined the winner for the last four Bachelorettes in a row) because then what would that mean about following her instinct for the rest of the process?
But more importantly, I think she really likes that he's religious. We have heard them talk about this exactly zero times because ABC, but reading between the lines, we know that Luke defines himself by his Christian faith, and we know that Hannah grew up in a traditionally Christian household and still holds that close to her today, thought she seems to wrestle with some of the ideologies she was taught growing up…
There is some disconnect between Hannah telling us how good of a person she thinks Luke is deep down, and the conversations we see them have which are, to date: a very boring first encounter, a second encounter where she took his shirt off and he massaged her at a cocktail party, and literally all the rest have been fighting. I can only assume that she finds it very appealing that he is the kind of Christian man she grew up in youth group assuming she would marry. The only problem is when you're a teenager, you're just like, "Christian? Abs? Check and check!" and don't know that there are some Christian men with abs who will see your attraction to them agreement to part-ownership of your body and your actions.
Luke either really doesn’t know who he is yet—he is only 24, and just started his life anew after God spoke to him in the shower a year ago, after all—and can't recognize the legitimate disconnect between the things he says and the things he does…or he has a real disorder. Both options are no good for Hannah who sees some sort of unearned potential in him. On their one-on-one, she tells him it bothers her that none of the guys like him because, "I want a man who people are drawn to … people are not drawn to you here."
The average person would be devastated to reckon with the fact that not only does no one like him, but the girl he likes knows about this. Not Luke. The men not liking him has no emotional effect on him, merely logistical, such as when he makes speeches and no one will listen to him.
"It's really not adding up," he tells Hannah. "Everyone I've ever met, every place, every school I've ever been too, everywhere I've ever been in my whole life—everyone loves me." Again, this is in the first 10 minutes of their date where Hannah is trying to figure out if she can possibly move forward with Luke. She cuts him off: "Don't say that!" She tells him that's an insanely boastful thing for him to say and the exact reason the other guys wouldn’t like him.
Hannah wants to know how Luke feels about all the drama surrounding him, and after explaining what feelings are to him, he responds, "A lot of how they're treating me is totally not right but it's not affecting me because I know I'm here for you, and I'm not ever gonna lose sight of that, and I want to give you clarity."
Luke says he wants to give Hannah clarity many, many times, but it's unclear exactly what he wants to make clear to her. Why she should like him, I guess? But what Hannah needs to know to understand why she likes him, is how he feels…
But Luke doesn’t have any feelings; it presents a problem. Hannah gets so frustrated talking on this cliff in Scotland to Luke, that she leaves the conversation and asks her producers if they can explain to him about what she means when she asks him to say how he feels. And I know they just do it because it will make for better TV, but to their credit, the producers are like, "Uh no, you need to talk to your boyfriend yourself if this is a boyfriend you would like to continue talking to."
For the record, Luke thinks this conversation is very healthy for their relationship "because all I want for us is to be able to move past this, be on the same page, and I want to give her clarity." They are not moving past this, they are not on the same page, and he is not giving her clarity.
When she returns, Luke asks Hannah if there's anything he's left out of his already very detailed explanation of how great he is, and Hannah tells him that it feels like he's just saying things he think she'll want to hear, but she wants to know the real stuff about him, "Like do you like macaroni and cheese or spaghetti more."
She is kind of joking, but this would be such an easy question to answer—maybe even elaborate on a little more as to what about your childhood led you to like one of those things more. Even saying that he clearly doesn't consume carbs would give more insight into Luke than what he ultimately says:
"I just don't want you to ever think I'm trying to say what you want me to say. I'm never gonna do that throughout this entire process. And I'm sorry if you felt like I did try to do that, I'm never gonna do that, I promise."
Luke's very favorite form of manipulation is to explicitly do something, and then when he learns that it upsets Hannah, state that not only was he not doing that thing, he will never do that thing. It’s not like she believes him, but it just makes her so mad that she can't think straight enough to even call him out on it.
But Hannah isn't the only one who's refusing to recognize a person for who they're clearly showing themselves to be.
Luke saw Hannah on TV and came up with this version of who she was, and he decided to win that person over. It doesn’t matter who Hannah shows herself to be now, or if she tells him that sometimes she's at church praying on her knees, but sometimes she's "a devilish bitch," he's still going to call her the woman of his dreams and tell her, "I can genuinely look you in the eyes and tell you that I love every single thing about you." Luke's mindset is…actively dangerous at this point.
Hannah begs Luke to recognize that she has flaws, and own up to the fact that he has flaws too, and to maybe even recognize aloud what he sees as one of those flaws.
That is not a joke photo, that is exactly what he says.
Hannah says that since she wasn't able to “see the real Luke” (she did), she can't give him the rose. They hug and Luke leaves. Then he tells the cameras, "Hannah was right, I have tried to be perfect, and now it's like my eyes have been opened."
Oh, I'm fucking sure. He runs back into the room with Hannah and tells her he just didn't know how to tell her what he was feeling because he didn't know what he was feeling. "I felt like crying, I thought a tear was gonna roll down my face, and then I felt like screaming!" It is truly so embarrassing to watch Luke emulate human emotion. More than that, it's a little chilling, because he always gets this creepy smile on his face when he's just sure he's about to blow Hannah away with something.
After he says he felt like screaming, and Hannah tells him, Well then scream!, he gets said look. He walks across the room and starts yelling: LIKE SERIOUSLY HANNAH, I WANT TO MOVE MOUNTAINS FOR YOU. I HATE THIS, I CAN'T STAND IT! SERIOUSLY, I CANNOT STAND IT!
That makes two of us you slimy fucker.
Hannah tells Luke exactly what she wants, he pushes back on it, then comes back and performs some hollowed-out shadow version of it. Just enough to give her some little bit of hope and keep him on to distract her another day. She doesn’t give him the rose right then, but she does eventually give it to him at the Rose Ceremony even though he gets in a loud fight with the other men at the Cocktail Party which causes Hannah to freak out, yell at all of her boyfriends that the need to "stay in their lane" and cancel the rest of the party, skipping straight to the Rose Ceremony.
Luke thanks Hannah for the second chance in Latvia by hearing that she went semi-naked bungee jumping with Garrett on their one-on-one and getting mad about it because "her body is her temple"
And like, gah Luke, read one other fucking book. Our bodies being our temples just means that we have been made a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit by the sacrifice of Christ, an avenue for us to commune with God through the power of the Holy Trinity. And if Hannah believes that what she did is not a sin in the eyes of God, which she tells Luke explicitly she does not, then she is keeping her body her sacred temple. It's just not your temple you creatine-addled douche canoe.
And that's really all I have to say on that. When Luke asks the other guys if it doesn't bother them that she was naked with Garrett in a completely unsexy situation, Tyler tells him no—he loves that she went for it and experienced Latvia to the fullest.
This man must be stopped.
On a completely different level, Luke must also be stopped. At the group date he's on, Luke is still so angry about Hannah showing a man her temple (not a thing), he decides that his feelings of possession over her are the first ever feelings he needs to express to her.
Luke starts off by comparing the feeling of hearing Garrett talk about his one-on-one with Hannah to the feeling of being cheated on, something that he never explicitly states has happened to him. "And it's just because, like, I know your body is a temple. And honestly, me just thinking of you holding him bare-skinned and I'm just thinking in my mind, it really pissed me off." Hannah keeps her face eerily still and tells Luke that she made a choice she’s fine with, and being semi-nude wasn't sexual, she just wanted to have the experience for herself.
"But still, at the same time," he tells her, "I'm looking for you to meet my family soon and it felt like it was a slap in the face." Later, Hannah will quote these lines back to Luke verbatim, and he will say that he wasn't even saying those things in correlation to naked bungee jumping, and she completely misunderstood him, and of course she has the right to make her own choices, and of course he wasn't saying she disrespected him and wasn't worthy of meeting his family because she sullied her temple (not a thing) with Garret's boxer-briefed dick.
"No matter what you do, like, I'm going to support you, even if you make a bone-headed mistake and you just do something completely out of your character, and something that's wrong, I'm going to do whatever it takes to make things right," Luke tells Hannah, his girlfriend who has just explicitly stated that she hasn't made a mistake and sees naked bungee jumping as well within her character (not a thing).
Later, when Hannah realizes just how much this conversation bothered her, and quotes the "boneheaded mistake" line back to him, Luke will tell her that she's twisting his words.
Luke walks away from the initial conversation so thrilled that he's finally been honest with Hannah and sure that he's going to get the rose; when Hannah later tells him that this conversation was very hurtful to her, he'll tell her that he went about it all wrong, and that his message was misunderstood.
Hannah cancels the third cocktail party in a row because a conversation with Luke has upset her, and then she gives Luke the rose. Afterward, in what seems to be a completely organic side conversation while the dudes are milling about, Chris Harrison himself asks Hannah what she likes about Luke. "I'm either falling in love with Luke, or Luke's making me go crazy," she responds. "I'm not sure which one."
I am.
And I'll see you back here before Hometowns to tell you why! For now, why don't we all take load off with Tyler and Mike actually treating their bodies like temples, shall we?