Prior to this season of Love Island starting, a very happily married couple I know were discussing whether they would succumb. He’d seen it before, she hadn’t. “You see, it’s kind of like chess,” he explained to her. “Chess?!” she scoffed. “You mean chess with tits!”
As “sells” go, “chess with tits” is a pretty good one for Love Island. If you can truly fall in love with someone – or at least truly manage to persuade the rest of the villa and the general public you have – you’ll bag yourselves a £50K cash prize and stand the chance to make millions when you’re finally flung out of paradise. Trouble is, you’re dependent on finding a partner in crime to go all in with you – the quintessential prisoner’s dilemma, only with added hormones and corporeal temptation.
As formulas go, it has a winning precedent – Big Brother. Some 5 million viewers tuned in during its heyday to see just how Stanford prison experiment it could get, especially once the producers started pitting the contestants against one another in tasks. Given that Love Island actively requires its chosen few to enter into a form of romantic game theory – selecting someone who is hopefully equally enamoured of them and sticking with them, no matter what – however superficial it may seem on the surface (a rotation of biceps, bikinis and bafflement over Brexit), the constant surveillance, enforced “recoupling” and creeping doubts over loyalties, formed at destabilising speed, make it more than a narcissistic pageant for a new crew of reality stars – this is a lesson in how humans meet, mate, hate and doubt themselves and one another again and again. What’s not to love?
But there’s more.
As children we learn most of everything we understand about love from our caretakers. Observing them, being nurtured by them, or being abandoned by them condition how we form romantic bonds as adults. As we mature, we often gain perspective on our parents’ mistakes, and empathy towards them. But that doesn’t usually offset the attachment style we’ve already developed as a result – broadly categorised today as secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, or fearful-avoidant.
So when it comes to being a contestant on Love Island, you can have all the game theory, charm, good looks and popularity with the audience in the world at the ready, until your “partner” unwittingly pulls on your attachment-style strings, especially if you’re part of the 40% that isn’t “secure”.
Even without an understanding of the terminology, most of us still have an instinctive understanding of the push/pull power games that often characterise an anxiously attached individual in thrall to an avoidantly attached one, and watching those play out can be unwittingly emotionally “arousing” for us, the viewer. While it’s difficult to accurately label anyone’s attachment style without delving into their past relationship history and upbringing, when we watch Adam maintain his roving eye and silver tongue with all the girls at the villa, despite coupling up with Rosie who had developed breakneck speed feelings for him, it is she who ends up sobbing to the other girls, “Why aren’t I enough?” Even after she confronts him publicly once about his snaky behaviour, a few days later and they’re “cosier” in bed than ever before – and then he’s on the prowl yet again. Who you side with – and how much – may tell you something about your own attachment style.
From an audience perspective, start to empathise, however briefly, and you’ll start to invest in the outcome – and keep watching. Add to this the chatter from Twitter, and water-cooler gossip with friends and family about why and who deserves to win, and we begin to see why this show inflames us – how to love is so rarely cross-examined that to hear someone we know and care for profess an entirely opposing view on it enthralls and infuriates us in equal measure. At this point, we may even continue to watch – and keep debating it – to keep the mutual personal excavation going.
But is Love Island simply so popular because we enjoy looking at attractive young people getting it on – and messing it up? Only partly. Love Island would not work as well with older contestants. But that’s not only because of the pulchritude/schadenfreude equation. With experience, we can grow better able to assess the authenticity and motivations of those we meet – or we can end up even more prejudiced, as we carry forth a wound from one bad relationship or business deal and allow it to colour every other encounter thereafter. You can be 80 and able to spot a sociopath at 50 paces, or still be rooting for the wrong one. The difference is, at 23, there’s still plenty of time for you to learn from your mistakes – and it’s that hope that keeps them – and us – invested.
And there’s the rub. Love Island, in essence, is not about love but about loyalty – not only between the couples but the fake or not friendships that guide the participants in their most vulnerable moments. When we watch Love Island, we’re on Couch Olympus. Can we figure out someone’s game plan, their unconscious motivations and how they will act before they do? If yes, we feel satisfied. If not, well, it’s only trash TV.
• Nichi Hodgson is the author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder and a sex and relationships broadcaster
