New York ? “The Bachelor” is still a bachelor.

Alex Michel, the star of ABC’s guilty pleasure reality series, picked Amanda Marsh from among 25 women who had competed for the chance to marry him.

But during Thursday night’s season finale, he didn’t give Marsh the Harry Winston diamond engagement ring he’d chosen. He pulled the engagement ring from his pocket and showed it to her, but then told her he’d hang onto it and asked her to move to California to live with him.

“Before we walk down the aisle together, I want to make sure we feel the same way about each other outside the fancy world of mansions and limousines,” he said. Marsh cried, threw her arms around him and agreed.

Michel chose Marsh, a 23-year-old event planner from Chanute, Kan., over the other finalist, Trista Rehn, a physical therapist and dancer for the NBA’s Miami Heat.

“You have made my heart race since the first day,” he told Rehn, 29. “I’ve enjoyed every moment that we’ve spent together, but I don’t think we’re meant to spend our lives together.”

She glared at him and later cried as she was driven away in a limousine.

“It’s not that I a thousand percent wanted to be engaged today,” she said. “It’s just that we had such a great talk the other night and he told me, ‘It’s you.’ Those were his words.”

Before revealing his choice, the 31-year-old, Harvard-educated management consultant brought both women home to Dallas to meet his family.

During the five-week series, Michel spent time with the contestants in groups and on individual dates, often looking into the camera to describe in confessional tones how fantastic they all were.

At the end of each episode, he narrowed the number of women at the “rose ceremony.” The jilted ones sometimes walked away in tears; one hyperventilated in the third episode and required medical treatment.

Critics have condemned the show as demeaning to women. Many compared it to the Fox fiasco of two years ago, “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire,” in which comedian Rick Rockwell and nurse Darva Conger married on live TV moments after they met. The couple split soon afterward when it was revealed that Rockwell had once threatened an ex-girlfriend.

But thanks to “The Bachelor’s” watercooler buzz, its ratings grew each week. Eleven million people tuned in Monday night to watch Michel pick the two finalists.

Before the season finale, ABC aired an hour-long reunion special in which the 23 rejected women dished on Michel. The network is already taking applications from bachelors and bachelorettes for a second season.