It’s no secret that potential Bachelor or Bachelorette contestant are put through a pretty stringent vetting process to get a shot at appearing on the show. Every hopeful is made to answer a ton of detailed, personal, and [sometimes downright crazy questions] in interviews and on paper before they can compete to find love.

But, perhaps surprisingly, the number one reason that potential contestants are taken out of the running actually comes out of the medical examinations they’re made to endure (yes, really).

Ben Hatta, who used to be Bachelor creator and executive producer Mike Fleiss’ assistant, revealed in a new interview with The New York Post that it’s in fact STDs — in particular herpes — that crushes the most girls’ Bachelor dreams before they can become reality.

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“As soon as the medical tests came back, you’d see that herpes was the biggest thing,” he said when discussing what it was like to break the news to potential contestants that they had an STD.

“And sometimes you’d be the first person to tell a contestant that they had herpes. You’d be like, ‘Uh, you should call your doctor.’ Why? ‘We’re not going to be able to have you on our show, but you should call your doctor.'”

“Then they’d realize they’d been denied from The Bachelor and now a bunch of people knew they had herpes.”

Look, finding out you have herpes can surely never be fun. So finding out from a producer on a reality TV show? That’s rough.

The Bachelor might have a bit of a reputation for exploiting unstable contestants (everybody’s seen right?) but Mike says it’s their strict medical and psychological testing that actually leads to the loss of some of the best potential personalities, as they value the health of the contestants above all else.

“We’re really careful about who we let on the show. We lose a lot of great potential characters because we’re so tough and stringent… Anyone who has any sort of borderline personality disorder or instability or any sort of past involving contemplation of suicide — we just can’t take the risk. We just don’t.”

While health assessments might seem like a smart move to most, Leslie Hughes, who competed for Sean Lowe‘s heart on Season 17 of the The Bachelor, has bluntly called the STD tests “crazy” in the past.

You know what else is crazy? Living with undetected herpes. (Just sayin’.)

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