Reality bites
How Love Island changed modern dating
Well, that’s it then. The end of my summer socialising. All those invitations to friends’ weddings and roof terrace barbecues and children’s christenings will have to fall by the wayside. No more holidays. No evening phone calls. Nothing that risks taking me out of the country or diverting my attention away from my television screen at 9pm each weeknight.
From Monday, I will have more important things to attend to. I refer, of course, to the return of Love Island, ITV2’S hit reality series that puts a group of highly telegenic millennials into a villa somewhere sunny, encourages them to couple up in order to win a cash prize and then films the results for public delectation. All this must preferably be done while the men wear advantageously cut swimming trunks and the women sport bikinis constructed from little more than scraps of dental floss.
Last year, Love Island was a surprise hit for ITV2, attracting 2.4 million viewers for the final, which saw contestants Kem and Amber crowned the winners. The couple later split, citing conflicting schedules. Still, as Lysander rightly says in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The course of true love never did run smooth, especially when there are nightclub public appearances to make and a clothing line for Boohoo. com to promote” (I paraphrase).
Love Island’s popularity prompted a tizzy of national debate. Everyone was talking about it: from earnest discussions on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to lengthy analyses in the broadsheets on whether the programme was trashy titillation or a compulsive examination of modern romance.
But I now realise that Love Island’s influence was even more far-reaching than I initially appreciated. When I watched it during the heady days of last summer, I was in a relationship. We broke up a couple of months after the finale (“conflicting schedules”) and, aged 38, I was then pitched into the unforgiving world of 21st-century dating. I downloaded all the necessary apps, called things like Bumble, Tinder or Hinge, as if they were high-spirited boys at a Fifties boarding school who had been given baffling nicknames.
I dutifully filled out the questionnaires (“How would your best friend describe you? What award should you be nominated for?”) and uploaded the requisite photos designed to make me look simultaneously approachable yet enigmatic.
It was as I started swiping left and matching with various men that the realisation dawned on me: Love Island had become an extended metaphor for modern dating.
It starts with the banter. Regular viewers of Love Island will know that “bantz” is often cited by both men and women as a highly desirable quality in a potential partner. In the olden days, it used to be referred to as GOSH in Lonely Hearts ads. It’s an ability both to make and take a joke, often with some sort of sexual undertone. You must be able to parry and thrust with verbal ease, just as Chris did last season when he asked what the most common owl was in Britain before hilariously revealing it was “a teat-owl”.
Dating in 2018 is, at a modest guess, approximately 98per cent Love Island-style bantering pre-amble. I had endless, lengthy messaging exchanges with men I’d never met and was never likely to meet. It would start off with an innocent question, “So your profile says you like golf?” and within seconds it would escalate to “Yeah, and I’ll show you how to get a hole in one [winking emoji]” and soon your entire day is measured out not in coffee spoons but in how many borderline lewd jokes you can make.
The non-stop textual badinage is exhausting and ultimately dispiriting. Most of the time, just like Love Island, it doesn’t go anywhere. It either fizzles out because you’ve reached bantz saturation point or you end up meeting in real life, walking into a dimly lit bar and knowing as soon as you’ve laid eyes on each other that you have no chemistry whatsoever and that all the meaningless texting was just that – meaningless.
Often, this anticlimax will come about because a potential paramour has posted incredibly flattering (some might say untruthful) photos of themselves on their dating profile. This, too, is very Love Island. On it, everyone looks as if they have stepped out from the pages of a glossy brochure advertising a mid-market spa in Essex. They are bright-eyed with great hair and hyper-toned bodies and teeth that flash white in ultraviolet light. On dating apps, everyone now has to curate their own lives to look like a version of this same physical ideal. Men will take photos of themselves reflected in gym mirrors, pectoral muscles straining against their T-shirts like Love Island’s Muggy Mike. Women will arch their backs and pout suggestively and apply Snapchat filters to make it look as if they’ve been lying in the sun for weeks à la Montana Rose Brown or Olivia Attwood. Inevitable disappointment follows when you meet in the flesh. The truth is: looking as good as a Love Island contestant is basically a full-time job and the majority of us can’t hope to compete because we have, well, full-time jobs. Love Island also brought it home to me just how disposable relationships have become.
On TV last year, I would watch mesmerised as the couples split up and re-formed with other halves as if this were just an expected course of action. Sure, there was a bit of an emotional fallout, but generally everyone simply got on with things.
Yet there were some subtle differences between the sexes. Whereas the men were initially happy to take what they could get, the women tended to get emotionally invested more quickly and see any hook-up as a potential future relationship.
Once again, this is reflected in the modern dating dynamic, where men appear to have the pick of the bunch.
On Bumble, it is up to the woman to make the first move, which you think sounds great, until you realise that all it means is that a distinctly mediocre bloke will get to feel like Ryan Gosling as his phone pings insistently with all the attention.
You will routinely be ghosted by men like this, who are bedazzled by choice, and who stop being in touch and never explain why.
Women, by contrast, are more likely to get their hopes up and indulge in some far-fetched romantic narrative, which ignores the fact the man they’ve matched with describes themselves as “spiritual” because they once read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Trust me, I’ve been there.
And what if, by some miracle of miracles, you do end up in a relationship? Well, then you have to play it all out in the full glare of social media for it to truly exist. You need to upload cutesy pictures to Instagram accompanied by captions like “Spending time with #bae” and tag each other in all your posts. It’s as if you’re creating your own reality TV programme, but played out for the benefit of your followers and friends rather than a prime-time audience.
Quite frankly, it’s a lot of bother for very little reward. Which is why I’d far rather watch other people dating so I don’t have to. Welcome back, Love Island. My, how I’ve missed you.
Love Island begins on ITV2 on Monday, 9pm