As someone who just recently started watching “Love Island USA,” I have to admit, I’m hooked. Reality TV is something that has always intrigued me because of the ethnographic aspects of watching people in dating shows or game shows, but “Love Island USA” is something else.

Not only can the audience watch raw and intimate footage of contestants, but they’re also given the opportunity to vote to determine the winners of the show. This raises an important question: Is the discourse online about “Love Island” contestants parasocial in nature, and are we normalizing obsessive behavior in the process?

A parasocial relationship is defined as “one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence.” By that definition, “Love Island,” through the use of voting interactions, is fostering parasocial relationships and takes them a step further by letting the audience make decisions in real-life scenarios simply for entertainment. 

I interviewed Zinnia Sirokman, a second-year education major at the University of Oregon, who discussed how the show has evolved. “I really enjoyed the show back then. I feel like it didn’t have the popularity that it does now. I’d even go to say some of the challenges were more personality-based, whereas now they seem much more performative.”

When asked about the impact of “Love Island” on younger viewers, Sirokman raised a critical point about self-esteem. “If you’re a 13-14 year old girl who watches the show thinking ‘I need to look like that,’ it fosters a really unhealthy narrative that is hard to break.”

Research supports this concern. In a research study done out of Singapore, researchers Siyoung Chung and Hichang Cho examine the parasocial relationship via reality television and social media.

They found that the combination of both social networking sites (SNS) and reality television can lead to an increase in associating reality television as perceived TV reality, with parasocial tendencies of brand credibility and endorsement credibility. 

Which simply means, we form emotional bonds with who we see on the television and choose to trust the people we “know” on the television as credible, even though we know TV is meant to entertain, not depict reality. 

So, why is there a disconnect between the audience and the contestants’ reality? 

This season, the producers themselves have acknowledged the toxicity brewing online by mentioning the cyberbullying and treatment of the contestants. Most notably, there was a message to the viewers in an episode that said, “The keyword in Love Island is … Love. We Love Our Fans. We Love Our Islanders. We Don’t Love Cyberbullying, Harassment or Hate.” 

And yet, people continue to take things too far, forgetting that dramatics are encouraged in the name of entertainment. The public humiliation is, unfortunately, thought of as “to be expected,” but the cyberbullying on the scene is truly uncomfortable to see. 

For instance, this season, Huda Mustafa faced a range of online backlash due to her behavior on the show. The cyberbullying goes as far as fans commenting on her appearance to her parenting skills. And all of this is happening while Mustafa remains in the villa completely unaware of the backlash awaiting her.

It’s uncomfortable to sit with the impending reality that Mustafa will soon realize what the world has decided for her. And it makes me think of other “Love Island” contestants who had more tragic endings. 

Sophie Gradon was a season two contestant on the original “Love Island UK” show. She was one of the show’s first openly bisexual contestants and was in the show’s first same sex couple in 2015. However, due to the show’s rising success and lack of mental health preparedness, contestants who went on the show, according to Gradon herself, “became public property overnight.” With the lack of mental health preparedness and the rise of the internet, three years after being on “Love Island UK,” Sophie Gradon ended her life. 

Sadly, she was not alone. Caroline Flack and Mike Thalassitis had similar fates. Flack took her life in 2020. Thalassitis ended his life in 2019. The popularity and attention from the show changed their lives forever, but it wasn’t the show alone. The media and the internet blurred the lines between reality and entertainment, turning contestants into characters who could be consumed, dissected and discarded at will, which to anyone is an unbearable experience. 

Sophie Gradon, Caroline Flack and Mike Thalassitis. Those are the names to remember before posting opinions online about “Love Island” this year. 

Let’s remember that at the end of the day, this show is just a show! No entertainment is worth destroying someone’s life. Ever.

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