Age of Love: Final episode

Before moving with renewed vigor into the intended normal beat of Sex and the Human Animal, obeisance to protocol dictates I wrap up coverage of NBC’s “Age of Love” reality show.

More than a week has passed since the episode aired, and devotees of the program certainly know that Mark, the 30-year-old bachelor, chose 20-something Amanda over 48-year-old Jennifer. They likely have had their fill of analysis (the threshold for satiety being likely low, given the thin premise of “Age of Love” and the somewhat predictable outcome. And they may even know that Jennifer has a Web site for her modeling endeavors. I would show a photo, but she has protected them against copying them from the site, and frankly, doing a screen capture and crop just doesn’t seem worth the effort. She is a beautiful woman, to be sure, and given the chemistry between her and Mark, I conclude that but for her age, she would have been Mark’s final choice.

Well, I say that, but wonder, too, what the effect was of a bizarre revelation Jennifer made during their carriage ride. She whispered to Mark, in essence, that during one sexual encounter, she had a number of orgasm so large that Mark could reply only that he didn’t believe that number was possible. Did she then seem sleazy to Mark, who strikes me as a person of taste and candor? Did she establish a precedent Mark didn’t believe he could match? (Men are competitive about this sort of thing.) Perhaps Jennifer wanted to come across as every bit as sexually viable as Amanda, her young competitor. But my guess is, she hurt her cause.

My wrap on the show is this: Romantic love is about many things, but for all the poetry, for all the promise of companionship, in the vast majority of cases, it is about reproduction. On that field, fertility trumps. In retrospect, the ending of “Age of Love” was only natural.