The End of My Love Island Journey

On cyberbullying, social media, and why we can't have nice things

Love Island was the perfect pandemic binge. There are at least 50 episodes a season and multiple previous seasons on streaming, no matter what type of accent you’re currently digging: UK, American, Australian, etc. I watched many seasons in a kind of rapt fugue state, stunned by how fascinating a show where almost nothing happens could be. I’ve been hooked ever since. For the uninitiated, Love Island places sexy young singles in a villa somewhere with strong sunlight and lovely background scenery (Majorca, for a long time; the current American season is in Fiji). They are encouraged to “couple up” with others in the villa — to be single is to be vulnerable to elimination — and to spend all day, every day just talking to the people you’re trapped with. New people come in (bombshells) and shake things up, and there are occasional soft-core challenges where everyone makes out with each other in weird theme outfits. But that’s pretty much it. Stick that out for six weeks, form a strong couple that the public likes (there is public voting — we’ll get to that) and you can come out of the villa with a passel of new Instagram followers, some brand deals, and maybe even a new honey (there are a number of successful Love Island relationships).

There are some key elements that make this show so elite: there is a new episode nearly every day for those six weeks, making the show feel overwhelming and inescapable, but usually in a good way. You feel immersed; there’s no time to just move on and think about something else when you’ve got another episode to get to in just a few hours. The villa is designed to be a reality television fun house; there are cameras everywhere, reducing the need for cameramen to interrupt the flow of your conversation by sticking a boom mic in your face. Finally, the Islanders are given nothing to do and nowhere to go; they must interact with each other, must bond, must fall in love. No social media, no television, no books. Nothing but the guy across from you in swim trunks talking about his horrible tattoos.

I wrote about my relationship with reality dating shows at length a few years ago and largely came to the conclusion that Love Island is the best of them because it breaks down the posture that people bring into their stint on any reality show these days. Reality television is too established a genre now to find many fresh victims; the people who go on these shows more likely than not already have established followings, are models, are from other reality shows, or are just really comfortable with the pressures of extended public exposure. People come into these shows glossy, armored with filler and BBLs and perfect highlights. They hire people to manage their social media while they’re sequestered; they have so many flattering bathing suits. But Love Island picks all that apart. At some point, when you’re having your hundredth chat on the daybeds and the cameras have faded entirely into the background, the real you starts to shine through all that bronzer. You start to catch feelings, start to smile instead of smize. You end up pouring your heart out to a person you met two weeks ago, end up committing to a real relationship.

Because the show releases a new episode nearly every day, it feels entirely current. There is only a few days’ delay between the events in the villa and the episodes depicting them; when the public votes for their most and least favorite Islanders, those votes have a nearly immediate impact on what goes on in the villa. Usually, this is an interesting wrench thrown into the proceedings. Being in the villa, you are entirely in this bubble with no contact from the outside world except for the results of the public’s periodic voting, which you have no context for and have to interpret based on little information. Why was I voted so high in the public’s love, but my partner was voted so low? Is there something about them I am not seeing? Why did the public choose me to couple up with her instead of this other girl I’ve been vibing with? Why was my couple voted right in the middle? Is that good or bad?

I am not naive enough to believe that there have been no problems with this process before. Whenever social media and rating people get involved, you’re swimming in shark-infested waters. I have largely stayed away from the social media side of Love Island in the past because I have tended to watch older seasons that I can binge all at once, and any Googling would spoil things. But I have to believe that there’s something particular about this year’s absolute trashfire of a season.

We are about halfway through season seven of Love Island USA, and we are pretty much all the way through my patience with people on the internet. To even think about typing the name “Huda” on a non-air-gapped device is to risk a torrent of what I’ll very generously call “opinion.” Heaven forbid you have thoughts on Jeremiah or, more recently, Vanna. There has been a hurricane-level response on social media to some of the people in the villa, and I want to be brief here in describing what’s being discussed because I am not interested in contributing to any of the debates about these people — we are so far beyond trying to have any kind of real conversation about anything. So, in brief, Huda and Jeremiah are two Islanders who coupled up early and seemed to form a very strong connection quickly. People have a lot of opinions on their respective and collective activity as a couple, although the bulk of the “opinions” seem to be focused on Huda, the female partner (shocker). Huda has been accused of being manipulative, mentally ill, emotionally abusive, violent, and a bad mother, just to name a handful. Jeremiah has been accused of being a “love bomber,” manipulative, emotionally abusive, immature, and stupid. Another islander, Vanna, has been accused of being addicted to plastic surgery (at 21) because she seems to have recently gotten some filler in her cheeks and lips before joining the show, so basically being accused of being ugly (getting off light in the grand scheme of things). Jeremiah and Vanna have both left the show, but Huda remains in her hermetically sealed bubble, presumably unaware of what awaits her.

If I haven’t made my positioning clear, I am disgusted by all of this. This is cyberbullying. This is cruelty. And this is what social media and reality television bring out of us. Katie Cassidy, the girlfriend of the late Liam Payne, posted a video recently asking people to please be kind to Vanna, and you know, stop calling a young woman ugly in front of thousands of strangers, and the comments were just a straight-up swamp of (mostyl) women (one memorably arguing that it wasn’t cyberbullying '“if it’s true”) calling Cassidy ugly herself. The show itself issued a statement recently, reading, “THE KEYWORD IN LOVE ISLAND IS... LOVE. WE LOVE OUR FANS. WE LOVE OUR ISLANDERS, WE DON'T LOVE CYBERBULLYING, HARASSMENT, OR HATE.” Predictably, the top comment on that post was calling for Huda to be institutionalized.

I have been drawn to Love Island in the past because it was remarkably effective at getting me to empathize with people I didn’t seem to have anything in common with. In many ways, the contestants on these shows are so different from me as to be practically aliens. What do I have in common with a Trump-supporting pool boy from Florida who has sent “thousands of nudes,” by his own admission? But after spending 20 hours with that guy, I feel such goodwill and empathy towards him that I want nothing more than for him to find the right girl and walk out of the villa with new hopes and dreams and maybe better political instincts. But the very things that inspire empathy in some have inspired its opposite in others.

I blame the show itself for some of this; this season was poorly cast, and the contestants feel strangely unfamiliar with what the show is meant to be about. There are other problems going on and other contestants that, in a normal year, would be raising eyebrows, and the show has made some truly bizarre structural choices this year in an attempt to right a ship that is already basically upside down. But I don’t think there’s anything the show could have done to prevent all this because I think at our core, this is who we are on the internet these days.

I want this to be more than just a lament and a retirement, although it is both of those things. I am going to stop watching the show for a while, and if I come back to it, it will be at a time when the internet has long since moved on to other things. I want to have some sort of unifying theory of what I think is going wrong here, though. So here’s my best shot.

Social media is all about opinions. Do you like this? Do you think it’s good? Did it make you laugh? Did you learn something? Do you want more things like this? Will you spend money on it? I think that the structure of social media has convinced us that our opinions are worth something far beyond their actual value. Thoughts that might have flitted through our brains at one point (“that young woman’s face looks kind of unnatural in a way I don’t personally find that attractive; I wish she would feel confident enough to not get work done”) become something that should be shared with others, publicly, on a platform where untold millions can see it. Reinforcement comes when others agree, and when some don’t, that opinion becomes entrenched because now you’re fighting to defend it. You’ll never encounter the woman the opinion is about; in fact, you feel invincible in your anonymity. That invincibility translates to superiority (not only should she not have gotten work done, but I am going to diagnose her with a mental illness, because she did something I disagree with, then socially throw her away by consigning her to wherever it is she would “get help” for said mental illness). In the end, it isn’t cyberbullying, was it? Because you were “right” and you wanted her to “get help,” didn’t you? Just calling attention to something “problematic.” Another day, another deviant punished.

I don’t think we deserve social media. I don’t think we deserve the power it gives us because we certainly don’t deserve the responsibility it begs of us. We also don’t deserve the entire concept of internet pop-therapy, as it seems to have convinced a lot of people that they’ve swallowed the DSM-5 and can diagnose clinical narcissism from 20 paces (from their TV). We don’t deserve a fun little summer dating show. We aren’t mature enough to handle it, to create distance between us and them, to see them as people, to hold our fucking tongues. I can’t do anything about any of this except try to excise some of this poison from my mind, try to find a way to stop being horrified that my fun little summer treat comes with a side of strangers asking for a mother to lose custody of her child because she got mad at her ex and cried for a couple days and called him a bitch on national television. I won’t even get into the whole racism and sexism of it all here because I am just too tired, and you guys already know that’s there because we’ve all been here before.

I can’t put the internet in time-out, so I’m putting myself in time-out because it’s the only quiet place left.