Well said, eowenc!

At the end of the day, this is a TV show after all, and I am one of those people who still get jaded and hope to see a love story, but I always have to bang my head once in a while

and put in the back of my mind that what we see is not exactly how the REAL story came about, but a "manufactured" story that is almost a 100% producer-driven. The "reality" persona may be giving the "inputs" to the story, but it is eventually the producers who splice and dice and mix up all these inputs to come up with a final product that they think would be interesting/dramatic/action-packed/(add adjective here) to majority of the TV viewers. Just my two cents.