The Popularity Contests of “Love Island”

Illustration by Hannah Robinson Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story 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.