‘Love Island’ and modern dating: why romance is dead

This season of Love Island USA has the timeline on fire … but maybe not for the same reasons as in the past.

“I think what is really appealing to me about it is it’s kind of like watching the Stanford prison experiment,” said Kelsey McKinney, writer and co-owner at Defector Media. “Like, the producers are just putting these people through absolute hell constantly.”

And this season, the torture is hitting a little too close to home. The problem? A lack of real romance and vulnerability between the contestants.

On an island that’s supposedly full of love, some viewers are feeling like they’re watching their own struggles to kindle romance. It’s Been a Minute host Brittany Luse chatted with McKinney and Sarah Hagi, co-host of the podcast Scamfluencers, to get into this season and what we want out of our reality TV.

Episode Highlights

What makes this season of Love Island USA feel different? 

BRITTANY LUSE: Last season, what made it so compelling was that there were moments where a guy would think he had lost this woman that he really liked, and so they’d cry, and do these grand gestures, and be having breakdowns running and chasing after them. And the guys [this year] have been emotionally disengaged in this way that I’ve seen some people compare on social media to watching real life red-pill content or dating advice play out.

KELSEY MCKINNEY: I think a really vivid example of this is in one of the challenges, they had all of the men blindfolded, and they brought in new women, and then they had the women kiss the men in their blindfolds. And then they asked the men to rate the kiss, which is incredible. Great game mechanics. One of these guys gives all of the women, like, a six on their kisses. And I was like, “are you negging? Like, what do you think you’re doing here?” Love Island does feel like [real life] dating, where it’s like, oh yeah, every straight woman I know trying to date right now is complaining about these exact same problems.

What do viewers want from Love Island?

SARAH HAGI: The thing that really hooked people last season was the genuine feeling of romance between a lot of these couples, like last year’s winners, Serena and Kordell. To me, because this season didn’t have a ton of real romance, there’s been such an emphasis on the drama behind the scenes. And there’s quite a lot of anger for people watching this show, because I think they’re kind of expecting a lot of the wholesomeness of last year, and that just isn’t really quite happening.

MCKINNEY: [People] really like to watch actual romance on TV. And I think a trap that producers often fall into and have fallen into on other dating shows is mistaking love for the show, for love for people being hurt and intense drama. Like The Bachelor had a whole problem where for years they were setting up these girls to be heartbroken and people stopped watching the show because it wasn’t fun. You want to see people fall in love. And I think the Love Island producers understand that. They know that people want to watch people actually fall in love. But you can’t make people fall in love. It’s part of the problem.

… And why people are still watching, even if this season’s rough.

MCKINNEY: There are a lot of sociological studies about why people watch reality TV. And one of the things that sociologists have found in this research is that people love to discuss the way that other people behave because that helps them understand the world. And that sounds a little erudite for what we are really doing, which is watching a bunch of really hot people run around a villa. But it is true, we love to dissect the way that other people behave. It helps us understand the world.

HAGI: It’s always so hard to know, what is normal in love? And you see [a] pretty homogenous group of people in terms of like, the type of hot they are. But you do see real things come out. You know, there’s one contestant that has become a fan favorite, Amaya, who came in as a bombshell and just hasn’t been lucky at all, but wears her heart on her sleeve and keeps facing rejection despite being a gorgeous, gorgeous woman. And to me, it’s like, wow, these women who I see as having all the choice in the world are having these problems. I guess it is universal. I think that’s also what creates this connection between viewers and these contestants.