Can I pull you for a chat?

When we think about the reality television sensation Love Island, we might not immediately think about friendship. The emphasis of the show, after all, is so firmly on coupling up with another contestant and hanging in there until you get a large cash prize for winning at romance. Any other alliances, friendship included, would only serve to distract you from the task at hand. Really, it feels more like a recipe for Backstabbing Island or Betrayal Island. Making this point, in season six of Love Island USA, contestant Aaron Evans even coined the iconic line, "It's not Friendship Island." Ironically, Evans said this while participating in a beautiful friendship with fellow contestant Rob Rausch. But they aren’t the only ones: looking back on the most important relationships forged on the show, made poolside, in the glam room, and over the endless hours spent simply hanging out in the villa, so many are friendships. There’s something beautiful about how these platonic bonds are the ones that really last. Often they do so far beyond the show, and beyond the romances the show is meant to prioritize.

What then can Love Island, the strange microcosm of our world, tell us about the relationships that are meaningful to us and the role they play in our lives? Even when there's a cash incentive to “mug each other off,” to use the official language of the show, it seems that the very human desire for connection—beyond the prize—wins out regardless, again and again.

To explore why this is and more, I spoke with Rebecca Jennings, a features writer at New York magazine and the author of Be The Bombshell: What Love Island Teaches Us About Dating. It's an irreverent and witty playbook for embracing your best self, using classic Love Island wisdom and lore to remind us of the fun of dating. This summer, for Montez Press Radio, we talked about parasocial relationships, the tenderness of seeing male friendships onscreen, and the glam communion found in club bathrooms.

First of all, a huge congratulations on the publication of Be The Bombshell. I wondered if you could just tell us a little more about the book, and about how it came to be.

This was such a joy to write. It's what we call a crash in the publishing world (they wanted this book out in time for this new season, which has just started to premiere), and so that meant writing it in two months. It's really just about taking lessons from the Love Islanders that we love and extrapolating those moments [to explore], what does that say about dating today? I feel like Love Island is such a good microcosm of the online dating world, but it takes place in a villa and we get to watch it.

There could be a kind of comfort in being like, okay, it's happening to everyone. Everyone has been heartbroken, and some of us are doing it on screen.

And in swimsuits in front of millions of people! In the introduction I talk about Maura Higgins, who's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life, and she just had this horrible time. Everything bad kept happening to her and I was like, if things are happening to you, like this kind of angelic Victoria's Secret model/Emily Ratajkowski mirror image, then what hope do the rest of us have?

I'm interested to know—how is Love Island UK seen in the US? The references are so British. I guess it's part of its appeal, but I always think, what are US audiences making of “mugging off”?

It's so funny to watch the U.S. Islanders, since Love Island US started after Love Island UK. It's so funny to watch them take the lingo from the British version, how they call a grilled cheese a toastie because you guys call it a toastie.

I think part of the reason why early seasons of the U.S. version didn't take off is because it didn't have the kind of messy magic that the U.K. version did. There's a great New Yorker piece about this and I've written a little bit about this too, about how U.K. reality shows don't have as much of the prudishness. They have a lot more nudity and swearing and literal sex on TV than [their equivalents in] the U.S., I think there are just different rules and different attitudes towards these things here. And so in the early seasons they're smoking, [and] they're having sex in full view of everybody else.

I also think American audiences are used to the kind of dating reality shows where the stakes are high and there's this emphasis on purity, being there for the right reasons, being ready for marriage. Whereas in Love Island UK, they have none of these pretensions. You are here to have fun in the sun and hook up with people. That should be enough, and I think that's what the U.S. seasons were missing at the beginning. 

It's interesting what you've said [in the book] about watching it in the pandemic. When I was watching [it] I was thinking about para-social relationships, how we feel we get really close to people we don't know and how they can almost be a place that we project a lot onto. And I know people are getting lonelier globally; we are hungry for connection. In your book you talk about making those face-to-face connections and actually leaving the house and not bed rotting and not retreating into an online-only space. I was wondering how you feel about that now. Do you think Love Island could bring us together?

I think part of the reason why people love watching Love Island is because it's this world where you're dating someone [and] you can't retreat behind your screen. So much of dating is mediated through your phone or through an app or something.

If we want to make dating feel like Love Island, that involves leaving your house, getting up off your bed, and I totally understand why it feels much safer [not to]. There's so much judgment even if you're in a bar and someone comes up to your group, it feels weird almost, right? And I don't remember feeling like that before the pandemic. It was a lot more normal for people to approach each other. [Now,] you have this stink on you if you're too thirsty in public with a stranger. And I think in order for the social dynamics of dating to change for the better, we need to get used to feeling a little bit of that stinkiness on us.

I love how in the book you wrote about how the ultimate test of the relationship and the purity [of it] is if someone is booted off and then you follow them [and leave too].

It's crazy to watch, and it's happened so rarely, but yeah, the most romantic thing anyone can do on Love Island is when their partner gets booted off, you go with them. “I am not here for the prize money. I am not here for a bombshell. I'm here for you and I will give up all of this for you.” But as you can imagine, this almost never happens.

People love watching the platonic relationships [too], because it feels like you can root for them in a way that doesn't feel like picking sides or like you're rooting for a doomed relationship. You can stan these two women who have found such a great friendship in each other. Friendship, it's like—that could be for their whole life. That's really exciting to see the beginning stages of, and I wish we saw that more on screen.

The show is very heteronormative and there's so many stereotypes about gender roles and so much shallowness, but I'm not seeing male friendships like that on TV anywhere else. To see such tender relationships on screen is just so important. 

Do you have a favorite Love Island word, would you say?

Well, I mean, I love all British slang. I love “proper fit,” I love “type on paper,” partly because of the way—it's mostly I think Essex girls—say it, I think it's such a joy to say, and so I understand why they say it all the time. And I also—this is such a reality TV thing to me—I just love the way that every time two people are having a conversation, they'll just be sitting by the fire pit or something, they'll be nodding, saying, "Love that, love that, love that," in response to anything that the other person says. 

I love “type on paper,” it's so clerical. “I'm just sitting here with my checklist, this idea of a perfect person.” I love how you talk in the book about how “type on paper” is actually a fallacy. We have an idea of someone and it can really close off people who are totally unexpected.

I talk about this in the book a little bit, but I went through this breakup and I was convinced I needed to find someone exactly like him, but a little different. And so I was using the apps in a way that was like, okay, I basically can only match with someone that is exactly like [my ex].

And when I met my now husband, I was just so suspicious of him because he didn't match up to all these ideas that I had about my “type on paper,” and it took me a really long time to fully break some walls down and trust him. 

In addition to platonic intimacy your book also addresses the queerness in Love Island. Again, as we have said, it's a really heteronormative show, but maybe Love Island gives more room [for bonds outside heterosexual romantic coupling] than a show like Love is Blind or Married at First Sight. What do you think, is it moving in that direction?

I totally see that happening, especially on the current season of Love Island US, there's a girl who's openly bi and another girl comes in and she chooses her to kiss for a challenge. In her confessional she's like, "I've been waiting to kiss her." And one of the girls is the star of this season so far.

I saw Love Island UK premiered this week, and there was an interview with one of the producers who said, "We just installed a bed that can fit four people. We tested it, so in case there's a throuple or something." And I was like, so they're literally encouraging this, which I think is really fun and cool because I think unlike so many of the other dating shows, which are so structured, Love Island has always morphed its structures season by season. It's never quite the same. So you really can do anything. It doesn't have to be super gendered, it doesn't have to even be super monogamous or coupled up. Whereas something like The Bachelor or Love is Blind can only work one way. We also have The Ultimatum: Queer Love, the most diabolical show I've ever seen in my life.

Yeah, it's so dysfunctional, to the point where I'm like, I don't even know if I can enjoy watching it because it just feels like there's a real duty of care issue.

No, it's torture. It's like you're watching torture. It’s similar to Temptation Island, you're just taking these people who are ostensibly in love and then ripping them apart and being like, "Hey, watch that person go have sex with your partner." But again, I hope this leads to more shows, maybe less structured shows about queer friendships, queer women, more like a Summer House or a Housewives, where it's just a bunch of friends doing whatever they want, put them in the house for the summer, see what happens.

It would actually be really cool to have Friendship Island.

Right?

Whoever makes best friends wins £50,000 and then they can just have a wonderful, platonic utopia.

I'm in my mid-30s and I live with one of my best friends and it's so great. Her dad always used to say that some of us were single because we watched too much Friends when we were growing up and I was like, it kind of is like Friends. We're just hanging out, being adults.

I think also, as a bi woman, I would feel kind of uncomfortable on Love Island hooking up with another woman, because it's so full of straight men.

Yeah, right? It's like people are watching you.

Maybe they could have a fully chaotic bisexual Love Island and I would be very into that.

Anything where you just put a bunch of bisexuals anyplace, I'll watch.

I wondered if we could talk a little bit more about the glam room. I loved that part in the book. For anyone who's not familiar with this sacred space, it is where everyone gets ready. Rivalries are put aside and people are grooming each other. And I thought about how gossip evolved as a form of grooming behavior, like we were picking things out of each other's hair. Those moments they have in the glam room, which are very girls' bathroom-at-the-club-coded, they feel really beautiful and integral, I guess, to the structure of the relationships in the show. 

I really looked forward to those scenes because, first of all, especially in the early seasons, it was like there was so much bronzer and false lashes, and that was the time where you saw all the women take their makeup off. I just thought it was so cool to see people were willing to be super vulnerable. And I think as any woman who has ever done their makeup with a friend knows, it's just so bonding and it's a space where you're not performing yet. 

There's a quote from Liv from Love Island US season six, who's like, "We'd be fighting over someone and then we'd be like, oh, can you do my eyeliner?" Any woman that has ever experienced that knows that something happens when you're in a bathroom in the club or putting your makeup on with a friend before going out.

I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about your favorite ever Love Island pairing?

Oh my God. I think in terms of “I could watch them forever,” it's easily Chris and Olivia, because she was so fiery. She was just so demanding and had such “don't fuck with me” energy. Meanwhile, Chris is this very delusional but also clearly very sensitive man—there's that iconic clip of him being like, "Everyone's into me here." And she's like, "Sit the fuck down, relax." But she could be soft with him and he could sometimes stand up to her when she was being really horrible. And so I think that's why they got their own spin-off show. I assume this ended in disaster, I know they're not together anymore.

But closely followed by my second favorite, which is Camilla's entire arc. She was the posh one and her job was to deactivate land mines in war-torn countries. She was paired up with this guy Johnny, who was just a lad, and then she kind of realizes that he treats her horribly. And then after Casa Amor, this guy Jamie comes in and he is just like this Disney prince dreamboat. He's really hot, really bookish and so her type. They immediately click, and now they're married with three kids and they are thriving. And I just loved that for her, because she was always crying in the villa and then finally she was like, “Okay, here's a good one.”

Yeah, a true success, it was just so incredibly wholesome. I love Chris and Olivia too, as a pairing. I think they were really a good match.

What is the most important thing that Love Island has taught you about friendship when you were writing the book? Was there anything that kept cropping up for you?

I think that even though the camera and the whole show is so focused on the couples and the drama between the couples, what you hear the contestants talking about the most after the show is the friendships that they made. And that feels so true to life, in the sense that the things that get celebrated most in your life are those sort of traditional adult milestones or traditional romantic milestones, like saying I love you, moving in together, getting married, getting engaged, having kids, whatever.

But the moments you probably remember and value are the in-between, platonic friendship moments. And that's part of the reason why I think my friends and I are very sappy with each other. That's why I love watching the sappiness of the platonic friendships on Love Island, especially between the men, because even though they don't get celebrated as much, both on- and off-screen in the real world, they are the things that make your life fun and happy and fulfilled, in a way that a single romantic relationship can't.

No, completely. I agree with you. I feel like it's so different to generations before where it was just [about] getting married, the romantic relationship is the thing. But to really have those friendships as part of your life and part of your household, I never want to lose that. I want to have my own villa.

I know. And I think, again, my friends and I talk about this all the time because we all live near each other and we're like, "You're not leaving right? You're not leaving, right?" And we'll do this thing, a compliment circle, where every time someone has a birthday, everyone gives the birthday person a compliment and then they give a compliment to everybody else, and we're just constantly being like, we are cherishing this moment, this time together. It's probably embarrassing and cringy, but we love it.

No, I love that. Everyone's crying by the end, right?

Right.

Thank you so much for our chat. It was really nice to talk about Love Island and friendship.

Thanks for pulling me for a chat.