Here for the right reasons

A shorter version of this post was first published by RTÉ Brainstorm on 29 July 2022, and can be found here.

The finale of ratings juggernaut Love Island airs on ITV2 on Monday 1 August, after eight weeks of captive psychological torture (for both its contestants and its viewers). Following a public vote, one lucky couple will be crowned as the villa champions and burgeoning-brand-ambassadors-supreme of 2022. Yet before the credits roll, the showrunners continue to insist on the same bizarre addendum as previous years: will the winning couple choose to share the £50k prize money, thus showing themselves ostensibly true of heart, or will one party claim it for themselves, proving they were in it for the money all along?

Despite speculation that contestants Ekin-Su and Davide’s turbulent love-hate relationship may lead to the first year in Love Island history that one of the winners steals the £50k for themselves, the answer to this absurd share-or-steal conundrum is a no-brainer for any canny reality television star. The show is, as described by journalists Sirin Kale and Pandora Sykes, an ‘influencer sausage factory’, and now on its eighth season, contestants are acutely aware of the money-spinning possibilities available to them outside the villa. Season three alumnus Olivia Attwood has, since her time on Love Island, appeared on Celebs Go Dating and The Only Way Is Essex, and has most recently featured in the ITV documentary series Olivia Attwood: Getting Filthy Rich, a deep-dive into online sex work. Kem Cetinay has had numerous television appearances since winning season three, and now co-presents official Love Island podcast The Morning After, as well as co-owning popular London restaurant Array. Amber Gill, winner of season five, is reportedly worth £2 million and launched fitness brand Amber Flexx in January 2021, following this up with her debut novel Until I Met You in 2022. As of March 2022, season five runner-up Molly-Mae Hague is a millionaire, having become Creative Director of Pretty Little Thing in August 2021. For the savvy Islander, Love Island can be a platform that launches their celebrity, or at least keeps them in teeth-whitener promo campaigns and mid-range panel show appearances for years to come.

Given this knowledge, it is difficult to suspend credulity at the idea that a contestant with not entirely romance-focused motives for featuring on the programme is somehow the height of scandal. While in past series this may not have been brought up in discourse between contestants, the 2021 seventh season of Love Island saw this come to the surface through conversations between coupled-up Islanders Liberty Poole and Jake Cornish. Poole discussed with a fellow contestant whether Cornish might be acting ‘for the cameras’, saying to him in bed that night: ‘I know you always tell me to remember we’re on a TV show, but the best thing to me is to just be yourself.’ This exchange was highlighted by fellow Islanders as evidence that Cornish was playing a game, performing for the cameras, not there ‘for the right reasons’. Prior to the 2021 series commencing, former Islander Dr Alex George advised that the singletons entering the process should ‘go in for the right reasons’, and that they should not view the experience as an opportunity for building a social media profile or celebrity career. The consensus seems to be that contestants can be separated into those who have entered into the reality TV process with wholesome motives to find love (apparently blinkered as to the career opportunities that may be afforded them post-villa), and those who nurse more insidious intentions of building an online following in order to sell branded sportswear and hair extensions.

Love Island is far from the only example of this imagined dichotomy. US reality dating programme The Bachelor premiered on ABC in 2002, with its sister show The Bachelorette launching the following year. The format is ostensibly simple: the series lead spends several weeks ‘dating’ about thirty people (all of whom live together in the same mansion), forming relationships and whittling the numbers down with a view to a proposal and engagement in the season finale. Perhaps in the early series, it was plausible to maintain that contestants were taking part ‘for the right reasons’—a chance at falling in love and getting engaged. The casts were full of earnest dental hygienists who largely fell out of the public eye once they were eliminated from the show; Instagram did not yet exist, influencer culture and sponcon had yet to be spawned.

Yet in the last decade, the evolution of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, not to mention the emergence of further ‘Bachelor Nation’ spin-offs such as Bachelor in Paradise (a Love Island-style bevy of rejected past contestants) has bred a savvier class of player. In a group of thirty people vying for the lead’s attention, the odds of making it to the very end of the process are decidedly unfavourable. Having weighed these odds up, a contestant might subtly direct their energies towards securing lower-hanging fruit; creating a personal brand, securing a spot on Paradise, building a social media following and public capital, and furthering their career. This was writ large in a conflagration of conflict in season seven of Bachelor in Paradise. Brendan Morais (The Bachelorette, season sixteen) and Pieper James (The Bachelor, season twenty-five) were filmed having a rare fourth-wall-breaking conversation about how many social media followers they had gained from tabloid coverage of their alleged pre-Paradise relationship. ‘That’s insane that you got 10k followers,’ Morais commented.‘Remember when I hit 70 [thousand]?’ replied James, the two of them going on to speak about the amount of screen time they hoped to receive during their time on the show. Morais had sustained a flirtation with fellow contestant Natasha Parker, who then accused him of using her to maintain his place on the show until James’s arrival. Morais and James came under fire for having a pre-existing relationship and using Bachelor in Paradise to bolster their social media following both on an individual basis and as a couple.

Morais and James’s faux pas was arguably clumsy given the expanding record of Bachelor alumni accused of entering into the process ‘for the wrong reasons’. In season twenty-five of The Bachelorette, the men unionised against their fellow contestant and shared nemesis Thomas Jacobs, accusing him of courting Bachelorette Katie Thurston insincerely, with secret designs to become the next Bachelor. Thurston, having been made aware of the men’s suspicions, sent Jacobs home with the dramatic declaration, ‘Your Bachelor audition ends tonight.’ This zero-tolerance approach is perhaps understandable given the outcome of season fifteen of The Bachelorette, in which Hannah Brown accepted a marriage proposal from suitor Jed Wyatt, whom it transpired had an unresolved prior relationship, as he had ostensibly only entered the process to promote his music career.

The ‘right reasons’ trope is embedded deep in the culture of reality dating shows despite its arguably waning relevance and plausibility. The 2021 series FBoy Island divided its contestants into ‘FBoys’ (unrepentant womanisers there for the prize money) and ‘self-identifying nice guys’ (earnestly looking for love). ITV2’s Ready to Mingle and Channel Four’s The Love Trap both featured line-ups of contestants who were either single or in a relationship, their status unknown to the series lead, and the moral being that those who were single were therefore trustworthy and pure of motive. NBC’s unhinged Regency-blend The Courtship swapped out ‘right reasons’ for ‘good intentions’. Yet it is now surely impossible not to view reality dating show contestants through the lens of aspiring celebrities and content creators seeking a public platform upon which to promote themselves.

It is unreasonable to expect Love Islanders to be on the show ‘for the right reasons’, and perhaps just as unreasonable to dictate that they should be. We as the viewing public are not beholden to the same ‘right reasons’; we watch these shows to be entertained by their dramatic twists and interpersonal politics, not because we want to watch people pure of heart fall in love. It is past time that reality dating shows stop keenly peddling the notion that the only sanctioned and acceptable motive for entering into such a process is to find a soulmate, and instead credit both their contestants and viewers with at least enough discernment not to believe this pretence.

Cover photo by Sean Oulashin on Unsplash