Last year, my lecturer referred to Love Island as a “lower pleasure”. I went home from that class and watched the latest episode with my flatmates huddled on the couch, waiting for the free hour of power to kick in. I don’t consider that a lower pleasure.
However, putting that sappy ‘I love my friends’ nonsense aside, Love Island is not everyone's cup of tea. More certainly, Love Island doesn’t have all the answers to modern dating. But what it has made me realise is that one of the most important aspects of a relationship is the obligations that come with it – what we owe another person. It turns out that Love Island is a pretty interesting lens for looking at this.
Reality television has long been used as a form of social commentary. Sure, it’s not that deep… but actually it kinda is. So, someone call Chidi (the one in The Good Place, not the one that was dumped from the villa), and let’s get into what we owe to each other.
Labels
A little while ago, I was trying to explain the difference between ‘exclusive’ and ‘dating’ to my mum. After a long, revealing discussion (typical of when your parents get you alone in a car for a long time) we agreed that there really wasn’t any difference other than the label.
Labels are a huge part of modern dating, and they swing around faster than Shein microtrends. We have casual sex, friends with benefits, situationships, being exclusive, dating, and a trillion other sub-labels with different conditions and expectations. Maybe the person you’re sleeping with went home last night with someone else from Vault, or someone took you out to dinner at Etrusco and then admitted they didn’t want a relationship. With the definitions of these labels being so malleable, it’s near impossible to know what we are actually owed in these situations, and how acceptable it is for our feelings to be hurt.
I wish I could sit here and make a neat little table of what a situationship entails compared to friends with benefits, but I can’t, because these labels are meaningless. Love Island takes this a step further.
On the show, Islanders typically ‘couple up’ pretty much right from the get go, and this doesn’t actually mean much at all. These initial couples are usually based on a fun fact about themselves, or how they look near-naked, and they all say their line about how the person they’re coupled up with might be their ‘priority’ (to ensure safety in the villa), but they’re totally going to explore every other option.
When they’ve decided they really fuck with their partner, or at least when they think the viewers will, they’ll ‘close it off’.This essentially means neither of them are getting to know anyone else – even new bombshells that come into the villa. Like you, they’re now in the same kind of weird limbo as you were in with that situationship that didn’t want you sleeping with other people but didn’t want a relationship. There is nothing that actually separates this stage from girlfwen-boyfwen, except the label.
However, the Islanders do (usually) manage to communicate what expectations come with each level of these meaningless labels. Out here in the real world, we could learn something from that.
Call it a situationship, call it dating, call it by your name, call it whatever you want – but define what ‘unofficial-nonexclusive-situationship’ means. It’s hard, sure, and it can feel intense at the start of a relationship, especially if you yourself don’t know what you want. All of us, or at least most of us, are trying to work out what we want, and then get what we want, and do so without hurting each other or ourselves. We aren’t going to get there if we stay so determined to keep making up new words that are just nonsensical excuses for avoiding any kind of strictly defined expectations or repercussions.
Rules
Social media has meant that most of our generation have pretty public lives. This makes discussion of these lives pretty unavoidable, and has led to some not so helpful TikTok-founded rules for relationships. The TikTok rulebook states that your partner absolutely cannot be friends with an ex, if they put their phone face down they’re definitely cheating, and if they say ‘will you be my girlfriend?’ instead of ‘may I be your boyfriend?’ they’ve got to go. Seems pretty clearcut.
Love Island throws all these ‘rules’ out the window. There, you can be coupled up with one guy, be pretend-dumped, hide in a room until you’re taken on a date by a bombshell who turns out to be the first guy's brother, and walk back in coupled up (I really can’t say this enough: it's such a good show). You can do all that because this isn’t real life and there’s no real consequences. While they aren’t allowed phones or more than like two glasses of wine, they don’t have rules. It’s actually a whole lot freer.
Love Island does, however, repeatedly perpetuate the idea that if someone hurts you and you’re sad about that, that sadness means you love them. Fuck that! People hurt each other all the time, and people feel it, and that doesn’t mean they’re in love. Sometimes we get hurt even though our partner hasn’t technically done anything wrong – these are not mutually exclusive things. Perpetuating this constant idea that love is meant to be painful, that your partner should hurt you because it shows you ‘care’ is bullshit.
By rendering all rules irrelevant, Love Island highlights which should stay in a TikTok comment section: there isn’t a three-month-rule, or a theory about how many texts you should send a day if you are or aren’t exclusive. There is communication, and basic human decency. We can work with that.
Sex
This one is easy: you never owe anyone sex, and no one ever owes you sex.
Someone who you bought a drink for in Subs doesn’t owe you sex (and was probably a fresher). Someone you’ve been dating for four years doesn’t owe you sex. Someone on a reality TV show doesn’t owe anyone sex, whether they’re getting to know each other, coupled up, or sharing a bed in the hideaway.
There's often a lot of discussion of body count on Love Island, with the men typically pretty blatantly expecting women to have a low number. Believe it or not, in real life you don’t owe it to anyone to write down how many people you’ve slept with on a chalkboard and reveal it on television. You don’t have to tell anyone at all if you don’t want to (except me, in the Critic Census – love you guys xx).
Body count has no impact on your sexual partners, and so doesn’t need to be shared. Things that do directly affect your partners, such as STDs, do need to be shared (but not shared). Please get tested.
Gender Dynamics
My argument that communication fixes every relationship problem starts to fall apart when you look at gender dynamics at play. Cis men have the upper hand, and these power dynamics are deeply entrenched in society, especially in the Western world. Men make more money than any other gender, they have more opportunities and more agency for self-determination, and even their ‘no’ means more than a woman’s.
These disparities are disturbingly visible in Love Island, especially in the recent UK Season 13. Although I originally included play-by-plays of examples in this article, I was a little concerned that I could whip out so many from memory, and ended up cutting them. However, this one can stay: after a challenge that pitted the girls and boys against each other, a massive argument breaks out where the boys accuse the girls of having a herd mentality, and of them holding the guys to a double standard.
Jasmine (my fav – not biased, just facts) responded to this better than I could: “Do you know the lives that women live and the double standards that we live every fucking day? If for one second we wanna have the upper leg, I think you guys can let us have it.” Basically, the Islanders hold their fellow girls and the boys to different standards, and so do the public in their dissections of each episode, because so does society.
Gender politics aside for a moment, this difference still isn’t surprising. We are all part of in-groups. And being in an in-group means there's an out-group in relation to it. One in-group is people who identify as girls, so the out-groups are any that girls therefore don’t belong to. Think Otago students versus everyone else, people who watch Love Island versus uncultured chuds. This is the interesting part: we naturally discriminate between these groups.
This has been demonstrated time and again, in psychological experiments exploring the minimal group paradigm, in real life, and in Love Island. So yes, whatever you want to call it – in-group/out-group discrimination, groupthink, or herd mentality – this does undoubtedly occur all the time, to varying degrees. It’s the same psychological phenomena that guides social media trends and FOMO. It’s the evolved self-interest that massively governs human decision making.
Let’s bring this back from me proving to myself that I’m learning something in my psych degree to critically appraise modern dating. Assume that by this time we’ve managed some communication with our partners, and we’ve established what we owe each other. What about sticking to this?
Most, if not all, of us, will have been in situations where we’ve supported or encouraged our friends' behaviour, when we really should’ve pulled them up on it. Often this comes down to our bias towards our in-group members, and while it is great to support your friends, it’s also important that you use your position to hold them accountable. Don’t encourage your friend to cheat on their partner in Vault for a free drink, and tell them that hurting their roster’s feelings unnecessarily and ‘for the plot’ isn’t fair. Don’t surround yourself with an echo chamber of a tight in-group, that will reinforce over and over again that you can do no wrong. Sadly, we all fuck up, and it’s okay to let our circle know that they have.
Answers
First and foremost, we owe each other communication. I really don’t have any other way to say this than what I’ve already said. Hand in hand with comms comes accountability and reciprocation.
Accountability is huge, because we do all make mistakes sometimes. But that excuse falls apart instantly if you don’t change your behavior, and work to fix whatever you screwed up. And sometimes you can’t fix it, and that’s not always up to you. Reciprocation is an important expectation that often goes unsaid: if you’re telling someone you don’t want them to sleep with anyone else, it follows that you aren’t sleeping with anyone else as well, unless, of course, you communicate that.
Modern dating is hard. We can all work to be better partners, and although everyone is different, and wants different things, these basic principles of what we owe each other can be tailored and applied to pretty much any kind of relationship you’ve got going on. Get your situationship over to watch some Love Island, tailor their TikTok algorithm to only show discussions deeping it, or just have a fucking conversation.
