We live in a no-brow* culture in which everything that used to be bad for you is now normal. While reality TV used to be the refuge of airheads and teenagers, now everyone has his fix. Saying you don’t watch reality TV is akin to saying that you don’t eat candy: It’s probably not true, and what are you pretending to be so ascetic and grown-up for anyway?

Every Wednesday I curl up with my wife and watch MTV’s The Challenge: Cutthroat. Because of the structure of the challenges and the condensed time period the show captures, I feel as if it gets momentum going toward an obvious, satisfying endpoint. You’re not just watching manufactured conflict play out in contrived scenarios, although there are dashes of that as well. You still get more than enough young people behaving badly. And after having watched all the different incarnations of the previous challenges, not to mention the original Real World and Road Rules seasons the participants are culled from, I feel as if I know them, however naive that sounds. Over the past few seasons, the challenges have gotten more intense, and the history the people share adds extra weight to the proceedings. It’s gone from guilty pleasure to legitimately exhilarating entertainment.

Wifey isn’t as enthusiastic about the show, but she’ll watch it. What has recently become problematic for her is my interest in one of the competitors: Laurel, pictured above.

To explain, my wife is not the type of jealous, over-protective girl who doesn’t want me looking at other women. She’s actually quite understanding of my week-long obsessions with boos, with my spelunking of the Internet for the finest in celebrity candids. Honestly, I’m probably not as delicate with these things around her as I should be. She doesn’t bat an eye when I describe the perverse, borderline evil things I would do to Zooey Deschanel. (I just thought of three, though I’m afraid to see them in print.) But I’m slowly learning her limits—my wife’s, that is—and those limits might be one Laurel Stucky (yeah, research).

I have trouble understanding the world around me sometimes, but I’ve never had trouble understanding myself. I have a specific type when it comes to females. (Cosmo does have something on my selection.) I like brunettes, petite but zaftig, even unrealistically so. I like a round face with huge, saucer-like doe-eyes—probably because huge peepers project an innocence that I sub-consciously and misogynistically believe the modern woman lacks. And it helps if she’s pale yet has a lot of natural color in her face, creating  a contrast with a blush that, again, projects a modesty and honesty that I sub-consciously believe the modern woman lacks. And of course my mom was a blushing brunette and—but hey, we’re talking about The Challenge here, not me.

My wife is well-aware of my tendencies—she has a lot of those qualities herself—so she knows what to expect. She even has fun with it now, entering a room with, “So you probably like that Zoe Kazan chick, right?” That’s why she hates that I’m interested in Laurel: It doesn’t make any sense. I might as well be saying: “You know that girl I’m friends with? I decided to fuck her. Everything you know is wrong.”

Although she is a pale brunette, Laurel is the antithesis of what I look for usually. She has a tall, athletic body and a long face with a high hairline. (Although she does move her mouth in a weird way when she talks, a midwestern detail I’m fond of.)

And it’s not as if I admire her as a person. She probably has the most odious personality on the show: At every stop she is petty, selfish, and cutting. She really shouldn’t have said all of those mean things to Big Easy in the hot tub, am I right?

Am I attracted to Laurel because she’s dominating and confident? That doesn’t sound like me. Am I attracted to her because she’s “real”? Because I objectify her anyway. She’s an ice princess, when I normally go for the girl-next-door. What does all of this mean? Am I trying to subvert my own expectations? Am I changing as a person? In the end, I don’t really know why I like her either, which is what really bothers my wife. I’m not the type of person who can’t articulate these things, so, if I can’t intellectualize this away, does that mean it’s somehow important? Just how predictable am I?

Wifey ends up attaching some significance about who I am and what she is to me from this show in which the red team tries to push the blue team into a pit. I don’t know what the point of all this was; but I’m beginning to feel ashamed by a part of my personality so elemental that I can’t control it, and I’m trying to suppress it to protect another person. Maybe that’s what real love is. So what am I trying to be so grown-up about?

*- This is John Seabrook’s term, from his troubling book of the same name, which has its moments but is not a substantial enough premise to merit a whole book.