The Bachelor brought Chris Soules and his harem of women to Santa Fe, N.M., where the bachelor hopes find out which women he has the best chemistry with.

The Bachelor Recap

Carly’s name is on the first suggestive one-on-one date card, which reads “Let’s come together.” The date throws the pair into an awkwardly intimate session with a love guru. They rub their hands all over each other, feed each other chocolate covered fruit and take their shirts off. When the guru instructs them to take each other’s pants off, Carly finally hits the breaks and tells Chris she’s uncomfortable. The guru then has Carly straddle Chris and tells the couple to breath each other in and out. After breathing on each other for several minutes, the love guru finally lets them kiss.

Finally back into some real clothes, Carly and Chris try to return to normalcy over dinner. During the course of the meal, Carly tells Chris that she hasn’t had sex with anyone in a year and a half because she’s scarred from her ex-boyfriend who never wanted to touch her. Chris tells her not to be insecure because she’s “cool” and then shares his own insecurities about being the farmer from Iowa, worrying that it’ll be hard to find a woman who will want to share a life with him there. At the end of the date, he gives her a rose.

While Carly and Chris were enjoying their forced and chaperoned intimacy, back at the hotel Kelsey is opening up to the girls about her late husband. Ashley and the rest try to show compassion, but are put off by Kelsey’s casual retelling of his shocking death. When the group date card arrives, revealing that Jade, Megan, Kaitlyn, Whitney, Mackenzie, Becca, Samantha, Ashley, and Kelsey are all going on it, Kelsey declares that white water rafting does not make her feel special.

During the group date, Jade reveals that she has a condition in which she exhibits signs of hypothermia in much higher temperatures than the average person. After she falls out of a raft, Chris, fearful for her health, rubs her feet to warm them. Back at the hotel, Jordan, who was kicked off the show after a drunken display, tries to plead with Chris to let her back into the competition. Though he initially considers letting her stick around for the group date, he eventually decides against it and sends her on her way. Whitney, who’d more or less stayed out of the fray, gets the date rose.

As Britt was the only one who hadn’t been on a date yet this week, she gets the final one-on-one. After Chris wakes her up at 4 a.m., Britt is off to face her fear of heights, as their date involves a trip on a hot air balloon. Afterwards, the two head back to his hotel room and chat about how many kids they want – a lot – and then take a nap together.

When Britt returns to the women and reveals that they napped together, no one is believing that’s all that went down – least of all Kelsey. Kelsey decides that she needs to tell Chris that she’s a widow ASAP, lest he send her home without knowing that part of her story. After telling Chris about her husband Sanderson Poe’s death and getting her first kiss from the bachelor, she tells the camera, “Isn’t my story amazing?! It’s tragic! But it’s amazing. I LOVE my story. This is the story of somebody who’s been through something so tragic and you get to watch her pick up the pieces and grow into another person and into another relationship.”

When Chris shows up at the cocktail party, he tells the girls about his emotional chat with Kelsey and gets so emotional himself that he has to leave the room. When he comes back, Chris reveals that there will be no cocktail party and that they’ll be going straight to the rose ceremony. Despite her apparent confidence, Kelsey walks away and proceeds to have a panic attack. The show wrapped up Monday night without a Rose Ceremony.

The Bachelor airs Mondays on ABC at 8/7c.

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