Courtesy of Erik Mclean
One of the strangest parts of watching reality TV is realizing how quickly strangers can start to feel like people you actually know. You get to see people’s highs and lows: who they like, who they fight with, who they cry over, and more. With Love Island becoming extremely popular this season, parasocial relationships have become one of the most common themes amongst posts on social media about Love Island. When the show ends, it doesn’t really end. People follow the cast on social media, watch their interviews, track their brand deals, dive into their personal lives, and keep up to date with their relationships. It’s almost an obsession.
A parasocial relationship is essentially an entirely one-sided relationship. You feel connected to someone and invest your time and emotional energy into them, but they don’t even know that you exist. Social media makes this relationship feel even more real to the person experiencing it, since they are no longer watching the person interact with other TV stars, but starting to see them in their personal life, interacting and responding to fans like themselves. The distance between the two can seem to disappear, but in reality it’s just your mind tricking you into believing it.
Love Island is almost perfectly constructed to create these kinds of relationships. You get to watch these people experience everything almost in real time, since episodes come out the day after it really happened. You watch real people, many times close in age to yourself, make friends, find love, and be done dirty. The contestants are recorded constantly throughout the day, through their regular conversations and biggest dramas, so you believe you really know what they are like. Then, you start deciding for yourself who is actually genuine and who deserves what. However, the truth is that you don’t. These people are still on a show, and they know that; they can control what they say and how they act to appear however they want.
The fans of this recent cast have made this painfully obvious. After the season ended, fans did not move on at all. If a couple did not post about each other on social media, like Melanie and Sincere, fans speculated that they weren’t together. Melanie posted a video of herself and a man on a motorcycle where you could not see the man’s face, and a million posts were instantly made speculating who the “mystery man” was that she had replaced Sincere with. Spoiler alert: it was still Sincere.
Not only have speculations run rampant, but the ideas of contestants and relationships that fans had in their heads and thought were true have been proven wrong time after time, even only a short while after the season’s end. During the show, the most common theory surrounding Kenzie was that towards the end of the show, she simply settled for her couple, Dylan, and actually wanted to continue having a “roster” and live the uncommitted life. They thought she didn’t like him as much as another contestant and settled with someone safe so that she could remain on the show and be liked by as many people as possible. They spoke about the relationship as if they knew the thoughts in her head. Yet, they have remained together amidst various breakups of other contestants and express happiness in their relationship outside of the villa. Viewers were so confident in their own interpretation of her feelings that they felt comfortable spreading massive hate, yet have seemingly been completely disproven.
Similarly, a fan-favorite contestant after leaving the show was Jen, who fans found extremely funny and personable, had recently been “exposed” for liking various Trump and MAGA posts. Once this was brought to light, fans were genuinely enraged that she was not left-leaning as they had suspected and took it as though they had been blindsided. People are allowed to be disappointed and stop supporting someone whenever they choose, but the intensity of the reaction just went to show how people had created an idea of Jen based on the version of her they saw on TV, and learning that she did not fit that image felt to many like betrayal.
The lesson from all of this should be simple: you do not really know these people. We know what they choose to show us, what the producers want us to see, and the things they tailor for their image on the internet. Everything besides that is pure speculation. You can root for couples and have opinions on the show, but you can’t know someone through a screen with zero conversation. Parasocial relationships can be extremely unhealthy, and you should remind yourself that Love Island is still a show and the people on it are still people.
