On the ugsome wordlet "bae"

Someone please explain "bae" to me.  I'm not the hippest when it comes to language.  I was the kid in school who used expressions no one understood because they were either archaic or British or both -- a function both of my reading habits (why Dickens's "ugsome" and "mephistophelean" aren't still commonly used is beyond me -- there's a great article about this here) and my heritage (though an entire 3rd-grade lunch table once made fun of me for using "out of the blue" and insisted that wasn't a thing, and I'm fairly sure it's neither British nor archaic -- though the incident did inspire a years-long reservation about using idioms in front of people I don't know well)....  And I never really used any slang except "Hypers," in a vain attempt to bring back the slang of 1930s and 40s Nancy Drew books (I don't advise this -- people will look at you like you have the thickest glasses ever and are wearing a "kick me" sign).  "Dude" and "cool" are about as slangy as I get, and I'm sure hipsters would frown upon my usage of both those words. 

So I'm not terribly surprised that I don't understand the word du jour (I have heard or read "bae" not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times [can I make "quarce" a thing?... No?... Okay then... ] in the last 24 hours) and that Google tells me I'm way late on picking up on this wordlet's usage (I'm making "wordlet" a thing, okay?  Just deal.  If "bae" can be a thing so can "wordlet")....  But my incomprehension of this wordlet (see -- "wordlet" is a thing now) is particularly strong because unlike, say, "on fleek," where people actually took the time to invent or repurpose a word, is not "bae" a one-letter-and-zero-syllable shortening of "babe?"  Eliminating that "b" must do something nifty, right?  Anyone care to clue me in as to what that nifty thing is?  What additional connotation does it carry when a grown person calls their significant other their "bae?"  Because urbandictionary.com tells me "bae" means "poop" in Danish, and dude, I don't think it's very cool to call your sweetie "poop."  In fact, I think it's positively ugsome.