The Popularity Contests of “Love Island”
In romance, Tolstoy’s aphorism about the family is reversed. All unhappy couples are alike, and all happy couples are happy in their own way. Happiness in a couple is a private and fathomless world, a far cry from the mere shared sensibility of the happy family; we can only make fun of the impish, impenetrable languages of other couples, which exclude us.
Yet we all know what it is to be unhappy in love. In unhappy couples, each person feels unaccompanied; whatever they have, they wish for a little more. The unhappy speak our language, and we speak theirs. The punctuation of this language is the moment when a woman’s face falls with disbelief, and when she weighs, in a tearful yet luxurious silence, her desire against her dignity.
At least, this is the language of unhappiness on reality TV. We are just now in the season of “Love Island,” the most fluorescent of reality dating shows, in which young, tanned, and wonderfully naïve singles compete to fall in lust and become one half of the cast’s—and the nation’s—most popular couple. The British islanders are currently sunning themselves in Mallorca; their American counterparts are enjoying similar tropical conditions and neon furnishings in Fiji. The communal bedrooms are open, the mike packs are strapped to this season’s bikinis (animal print and accent hardware abound), and a roster of “bombshells” and Casa Amor hotties—seducers flown in to test the contestants’ romances—are said to be holding in isolation in nearby hotels. More than twenty other versions of the show have been produced since it began airing in the U.K. in 2015, and between them much of the calendar year is now covered. But June is the original and proprietary ground for “Love Island,” that hinge point when all the vague aspirations for the year have been half dashed, and the summer looks both opulent and devastatingly short.
And the participants of “Love Island” don’t waste any time. The first batch of islanders usually “couple up” by the end of the first night; each shares a bed in the villa’s dormitory with the person with whom they are in a couple, and the couples are reconfigured every few days at a ritual dubbed the “recoupling.” Fail to get picked by your crush at a recoupling, and you become “vulnerable”—the show’s term of art for a single person—and won’t last long unless you form another connection. Fresh bombshells are constantly rotated in, each one causing a stir akin to a Presidential drive-by. Dumpings can happen by elimination, by public vote—every week or so, viewers can choose their favorite islanders or pick who a new bombshell should pair up with—or, more diabolically, by the other islanders’ selection. But these are merely customs, not rules. Islanders who appear safely ensconced in couples are sometimes booted off anyway in the season’s endgame, and the producers occasionally lob recently dumped islanders back into the villa after they’ve been summarily mourned, and after their former lovers have started making eyes at their friends.
It’s true, I’ll admit, that much of what is disgraceful across reality television disgraces “Love Island.” The pure-hearted chaos of the early seasons now threatens to be leeched by influencers and microcelebrities hunting for brand partnerships and appearances on a variety of spinoff dating shows. The vacant jargon that the show’s casts have cultivated and worn to bits—to “pull her for a chat,” to go after “my type on paper,” and to fear being “mugged off” or made to look a fool—does begin, around the midseason mark, to degrade one’s belief in a general and reliable human intelligence. And it is, of course, chock-full of contrivance, extorted confessions, and the inevitable false feeling that characterizes both speed dating and being filmed.
Yet where most reality dating shows only exacerbate this spirit of contrivance by airing weekly edited hours or, worse still, full-season drops, “Love Island” transcends this with a healthy schedule: new episodes air almost every night. Whereas “The Bachelor” is based on the competition of a harem for one man, and “Love Is Blind” the masquerade of getting to know someone through a wall, “Love Island” is primarily characterized not by its lurid setting or its teen-aged stakes but by its rhythmic marathon quality. Viewers of the U.K. series watch the islanders for an hour per day, six days per week, for eight weeks, with hour-long blooper reels airing on off nights. It’s a pretty serious two-month relationship. (My girlfriend is appalled by my commitment to this seasonal fling.) Both for the islanders and for us, the summer shimmers with a hallucinatory mixture of languor and emotional speed, as summers do in childhood.
The U.S. franchise, whether because of budget limitations or out of fear that the American attention span is too scarce even for reality television, abridges the season to about thirty-five hours. Although that may sound like plenty to those who have been slowly trained to accept the eight-hour series, “Love Island” connoisseurs know this scale of reduction threatens to rob the show of its exquisitely indolent flavor. A sixty-hour arc can’t help but outrun the early sheen of artificiality; by the middle of the season, “Love Island” (U.K.) has an inevitable truth glimmering through it, as if even the efforts of the producers to wrangle decisive plots are half powerless against the islanders’ irrepressible romantic personalities, which, given enough time, will always out.
Most romantic reality shows would have us believe that dating is about getting married, or simply about being chosen. “Love Island” knows better. The show only pretends to be organized around romantic couples. In fact, its definition of a couple is more structural than emotional: islanders sometimes pair up with their friends in order to stave off elimination. The islanders love to say, in attempts to justify their social transgressions, that they aren’t on “Friend Island,” but the disavowal itself attests to the force of friendship in the villa. For most islanders—not to mention for most of us watching—the search for love is a false grail, belying a rabid, desperate host of social needs that actively undermine the pursuit. This is a world of girls and boys. Its fundamental charm lies in its playground quality, in its capacity to speak not to our practical adult hopes but to our simple wish to belong. Absent here are soundproofed pods and private dates, themselves eerily reminiscent of conversations on and off dating apps, where hopefuls approach one another with no shared referents beyond religion or the music of their youth, and where only one opinion matters. “Love Island” understands that the intrigue and emotion of love lives not merely in private moments but also in the opinions, judgments, and jealousies of other people.
It’s a delicate, near-impossible task that the islanders have been given: to create a social world in which they can plausibly like and trust one another, even as they’re constantly surveilled and in competition. And in these demanding and deranged conditions—they eat, sleep, and crawl through inflatable pools of slime together—the cast invariably forms a rigid and particular set of rules. The girls of “Love Island” agree to never “put all your eggs in one basket,” yet to be sure to choose a man who is “all for you,” to be an unfailing “girls’ girl,” and to “give everyone a chance.” Good behavior hinges on “respect,” which involves a delicate balance of honesty and kindness, and hurt is quickly transmuted into anger at being “disrespected,” since disrespect is the only recognized transgression in the reluctant polycule of the villa. When you kiss a boy that your friend is coupled up with, the protocol is to tell your friend right away, while reassuring her that she has nothing to worry about, since he obviously prefers her. “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” you repeat to each other fervently, warding off backlash. Let’s not forget that the show is, in the end, a popularity contest: one in which each person tries to summon the farrago of confidence, vulnerability, scheming, and resignation that falling in love demands, while the twin audiences of their fellow-islanders and the public assess their success.
The previous season of “Love Island” (U.K.), Season 12, was exceptional because the cast’s social values were divided, and the girls formed two enemy groups that actively rooted against each other. The majority side was anchored by two “nice” girls, Helena and Meg, who insisted that they were friends with everyone, seldom risked romantic failure, and generally avoided stirring the pot. Their rivals were a candid, impudent pair, the schoolgirlish Shakira and a throaty American bottle-service girl named Toni, both incapable of conniving their way into romance, prone to heartbreak, and swiftly ostracized for their overt judgment of other islanders. The foundational divide—whether to conceal one’s resentments for the good of the group, or to be “genuine” at the expense of kindness—played out among the girls, of course. “Love Island” is for, about, and judged by its girls. The boys are basically there to have a good time, and tend to feel undermined when they find themselves smitten.
Toni and Shakira appeared to be in trouble after one of the show’s most meta humiliation rituals, in which the group is treated to a showing of clips of themselves having private conversations about their castmates and lovers. (Few of us, watching this unfold, can imagine that we would fare tolerably in such circumstances.) The screening usually focusses on clandestine hanky-panky, but this season the girls’ irreverence was so abundant that the producers treated them to an unprecedented second viewing night. Here was Toni calling the other girls frauds, and Shakira designating the star boys “the most crazy, manipulative men” she’d ever met in her life. “I don’t want to have a conversation with any of these people,” Toni said. To resent a rival is par for the course in the villa, but Toni and Shakira’s condemnations registered as truly antisocial. The guys who were interested in them were forced to toe a fine and awkward line with the rest of the group. The nice-girls clique was not merely horrified; they were certain that they’d be avenged and win the season.
Bratty, guileless Toni and Shakira emerged victorious, of course. It was Toni, the shit-talking misfit from Las Vegas, who won the big prize with her innocuous boyfriend, Cach. The winners of last year’s season of “Love Island USA,” too, were a late-stage pairing of an outspoken favorite, Amaya Espinal, and the boy who chose her; both Amaya and Toni were so prone to annoying their fellow-islanders that discovering they were popular with the public came as a shock. But it shouldn’t have: the dutiful couples of “Love Island” are perennially disbelieving that the most frustrating, unguarded girls, rather than the longest-standing pairings, should be rewarded. The deliciously frank Amber Gill, whose impertinence and blind loyalty won over her audience, created that mold when she became the winner of perhaps the most beloved season of “Love Island” (U.K.), Season 5. The islanders reward one another for making their tiny, punishing world livable and fun; the public rewards them for making good TV.
Usually—unless you’re Toni—the trick is to do both. The audience and the other participants go to great lengths each season to insure the safety of the few indefatigable girls who impress us with their authenticity and make full use of their latitude to become tragic heroines. Romance is the vehicle through which a girl reveals herself; the boy she ends up with hardly matters, nor do we care whether he’ll last. And though the story’s always the same, I never tire of watching these girls—and, obviously, neither do the British and American viewing publics. (The last season of “Love Island USA” was, by some metrics, the most-streamed original show of 2025.) The more troubled, awkward, and doomed the search for love, the more we believe it might actually be real.
Like a new school year, a “Love Island” season takes a few weeks to reveal its key players, its mandates, and its hot new slang. This summer, the British islanders have slowly adopted a rule against kissing two different people on the same day. The boys complain that this has solidified things too early—limiting kissing prevents bed-hopping and recoupling surprises—but the girls seem to find it a useful organizing principle. Now there’s a good reason for Ellie, a Scottish blonde, to denounce the debauched Tommy for seeking three different kisses in a single evening: he broke the rule. Now there’s a way for Priya, widely acknowledged among her fellow-islanders as lacking compunction, to show that she “respects” the other girls by waiting a day before kissing their men. (No such rule has arisen on the U.S.A. season, whose première saw the girls and boys arrayed on opposite sides of a series of doors marked with preferences such as “Missionary,” “Doggy,” and “Cowgirl”; from the shores of Fiji, a single kiss a day looks paltry.)
In the tradition of “Love Island,” one pair of rosy-cheeked islanders, Sean and Lola, have fallen into a swift and ecstatic something; twelve seasons, and common sense, tell us to give them until about the week-five mark. (If they make it past that, they may have a chance at entering the rarefied territory occupied by Tommy Fury and Molly-Mae Hague, the first-week couple from Season 5, who recently welcomed their second child.) The rest of the islanders are dancing around one another, none more ineptly than a laconic, chestnut-haired British Italian named Lorenzo, whose looks make him a favorite but who seems genuinely perplexed by the expectation that one work up a sweat while dating in the villa. He simply sits there, expecting girls to flock to him. And they do, though his initial favorite—a straight-faced and ferociously straight-talking brunette named Jasmine—has little patience for his torpor. One after another, the girls explain to Lorenzo that if he wants to get anywhere, he must pay them compliments and express his intentions. He’s this year’s stand-in for us, receiving all these rules of play with a baffled but willing air.
Among the villa’s girls are all varieties of well-meaning and conflict-avoidant: bubbly, sincere Yasmin, moved to tears by real empathy when she makes a mistake; aloof, fearful Mica, who looks for every chance to get the ick; and quiet and observant Angelista, who does what needs doing but not without reluctance. It’s Jasmine, an influencer with a refreshing disinterest in burnishing her image, who is the obvious heroine of the season. She announces her opinion with rare, fearless calm, and though her beauty earns her plenty of attention, she makes little effort to flirt, charm, or inveigle.
But it’s not easy to stand on business, lest we forget Toni and Shakira’s trials. During an early challenge, the villa erupted when Lorenzo claimed to have forgotten the names of most of the women he’s slept with. The girls cried disrespect. But the boys, in turn, were horrified to find out that most of the girls keep lists of the men they’ve slept with, and insisted, with reason, that, if they were to keep such lists, they would be branded chauvinist rather than respectful. Jasmine defended the girls so sharply that one of the cheekier boys, accustomed to acquiescent women, couldn’t help but call her “off-putting.” Lorenzo explained himself more gently. “It’s not about remembering people’s names,” he told Jasmine, in his gnomic way. “It’s about having an experience.”
It was the end of a long, rowdy night in what was still the advent of a long season, and Jasmine wore an expression of nearly ancient sadness—a pensive, familiar disbelief at the burden of educating the Lorenzos of the world. “We make lists on our notes page, and we put them away in a locked little area so that one day when we’re really old, we don’t have anything that we forget,” she explained wearily. “There’s no one we don’t remember.” I shivered to hear Jasmine describe, from her plush lounge chair in Mallorca, exactly where I keep my list and what it’s for. Maybe all girls are alike, happy or unhappy, after all. I hope Jasmine finds love, though I doubt she’ll find it in the villa. Either way, I’ll watch her until the bitter end. ♦