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http://tv.zap2it.com/news/tvnewsdaily.html?23942

Couple Survives 'Temptation Island 2'
Mon, Feb 18, 2002 03:56 PM PDT
by Vanessa Sibbald
Zap2it.com, TV News

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - If viewers were rooting for one couple from "Temptation Island 2"to stay together, it had to be Shannon Rutledge and John Dolan, who never really seemed to get into the spirit of things and whose separation wore especially on Rutledge who slept with Dolan's picture, and courted being disciplined by trying to communicate with Dolan through secret notes and forbidden conversation.

Their reunion on the reality show's "climatic" season finale showed that the two were obviously in love, making one question why they ever went on the show to begin with.

"I went basically to see if he would cheat on me -- that's probably my biggest reason," Rutledge tells Zap2it.com "I had a really rocky past."

"It was a new relationship and we were either going to move to that next level or we were probably going to break up. My thought process was: If he cheats on me, I'll be stronger for it and we'll split up; and if he doesn't, great, our relationship will be stronger for it."

Dolan says he played along, but he had no intention of enjoying forbidden fruit.

"I knew going on that I wasn't going to do anything that could be called cheating," he says. "I went on it because I was bartending and I thought maybe it would give me a break and because I wanted to prove to Shannon that not every guy would cheat."

Plus, he says, there wouldn't be any advantages to cheating on national television.

"I thought, if I meet a few girls that I like and decided to cheat with them, what's the positives of that? The positives would be, yeah, I got laid. Big deal. That's it. The negatives would be my family would see that, I would be portrayed in society, I would break the heart of an amazing girl and I would have all the other girls in the world hate me for cheating on my girlfriend," he laughs.

Instead, he says he stayed true to his nature and didn't let the show's 16 alluring single females tempt him to do anything worse than hugging another woman during the 30 days he was separated from his girlfriend.

Dolan says he and Nayla (the single he spent the lion's share of his time with) really didn't have this "huge bond as a couple." "You get to the point where you're so lonely that you want to feel a body and she would be next to me. Yeah, we hugged and then I would go to my room and, yeah, I'd think about both of them but my thoughts were with Shannon in the long run," he says.

While the two generally agree the show's portrayal of them on-screen, both agree that a lot of the cast members' personality was left on the cutting room floor.

"I think some moments were exaggerated and I felt that they elaborated on an emotion, but all-in-all I felt it was pretty realistic. I felt it was pretty realistic for all of us," Rutledge says. "They can't show anything I didn't do and I didn't cry a lot, but I cried those few times that they liked to show a lot," she laughs.

"The only thing I am upset about is the way they portrayed Shannon," Dolan says. "They didn't show how big her heart is. They didn't show how compassionate she was to the other girls when she saw all that stuff -- and even though I didn't see it, I know she was. She goes downtown in Phoenix and feeds the homeless. How could they show her being negative when that's not her?"

Rutledge admits that she did fight the show a little bit, but it made the experience more rewarding for her at the end.

"I kind of fought it at first, but honestly what I took out of the process was better than anything that anyone else took out of the process," she says. "Even though it might have been a harder journey for me because I had some control issues, the end result was so strong for me."

"If we didn't go on the show, I might not feel the way I do about John right now," she says. "Absence, in our case, really did make the heart fonder."

While there's no engagement as of yet, the two have only spent two says apart since returning from the island. Even then, they were constantly on the phone with each other.

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Uh, John, "big-hearted" is not the first thing that enters my mind when I think of Shannon...