My Type On Paper: The Language of Love Island
Can I grab you for a chat?
Love Island is an obvious fantasy. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl share minutes of bland conversation about types and professions, stare deeply into each others eyes, and gossip with their same-gendered friends. The two incredibly hot people kiss, spoon, “do bits” and go on at least one date that involves a picnic, boat ride, or lots of rose petals. One of them, typically the boy, asks the girl to be his girlfriend through a scavenger hunt through the million dollar villa, where the partner must go to all the spots that are “special” to them and are also coincidentally easily filmable and the only spots in said villa. They say I love you. Win or lose, they become minor instagram celebrities who stay together for at least two months after the end of the show.
It’s incredibly satisfying to watch the romantic progress unfold. There’s drama, stilted conversation, faking it for the sake of staying on the show, but the formula prevails. Each couple has to fight to be both settled down enough to be genuine but have enough drama to merit screen time and get the viewer invested in their relationship, and has to contend with 24/7 filming.
I love love, I love watching people fall in love, I love gossip that has nothing to do with me, and I love insane challenges. Love Island is all of those things, and as the contestants get increasingly good at it as seasons progress— at knowing when to push forward, when to pull back, how to have a deep roster without being labeled as “playing a game”, and how to wear sheer pants— the show loses some of its original verve, but at least everyone knows more about what they are getting in to.
A lot can/ has/ should be written about Love Island: about how it’s peak surveillance, prompting increased self regulation leading to increasingly boring television, about how it has led to some pretty extreme mental health episodes for its contestants, and is at least partially culpable for several suicides, about how it’s a microcosm of racist and colorist dating preferences and practices.
The reason the show has continued is because of its success in embodying a projection of desire. Of the desire to be a hot sexy single living it up in Mallorca, dancing on, and flirting with nine other singles guaranteed a million dollar PLT contract after leaving (unless you are a woman of color, in which case, contracts after are definitely not guaranteed). Of the desire to date like you thought it would be in middle school, with picnics and rose petals and sundresses and hot tubs. Of the desire to have a tight knit group of “girls” or “lads” to tell all of your dating woes and joys to.
Of course it’s a projection, of course it’s a fantasy, and of course the enactment of those projections ends in slut shaming, racial preferences, and incredibly stilted phrases. The projection must be maintained, trimmed and well lit and manufactured. The contestants show it, with plastic surgery, zero body hair and low body fat, sexy but rarely sexual performances, each hot person’s dialogue cut to be just the plot, none of the character building.
Part of the stilted LI-language is Britishisms, the lack of which being good part of the reason the US version of Love Island is unwatchable. Part of this is a strict adherence to a script. You can’t say “I’m hurt you stole the guy I like,” you can only say “It’s not even what you did, it’s just the way you went about it”. You can’t say “I’m not sure if we’re right for each other, and I want to keep seeing other people,” you can only say “on the outside world, she’s my type on paper to a T”. You definitely can’t say “We need to talk,” and instead always have to ask “Can I pull you for a chat?”
The language provides a script for tricky moments, good and bad. Dating can’t unfold as it would on the outside world: there’s no space or time for it, so all grievances must be aired, and ghosting can last only twelve hours (“It’s muggy that you didn’t pull me for a chat earlier”). The script smoothes over confrontation, typically putting the onus on actions rather than personalities, mandating what can and cannot be protested, what can and cannot be said to peers and to the TV audience.
Love Island reminds us that it’s actually pretty hard to fake something, especially when you’re constantly being watched. Jake and Liberty, Curtis and Amy, Hugo and just about anyone: impending train wrecks that the viewer spends most of the season knowing about. It’s like watching any first Tinder date in any coffee shop: the two on the date might not know it, but from the outside, it’s pretty easy to see when it’s just not working.
Moments of deviance come as a shock. When (SPOILERS) Jessie asks Tanya if she and Shaq slept together in the Hideaway, it is kind of shocking. Hooking up is normally called “doing bits,” sex euphemistically called “graduating” in past seasons. The use of such outside, non-villa language grounds the moment. In a rare moment of stripped down vulnerability, the girls talk about how it brought them closer to their partners. It’s a confessional to something we as the viewers already knew happened, but their language allowing us to remember that they’re not girls, they’re women, women who have both the agency to have sex and to talk about it.
The language supports the truth telling. Though contestants frequently lie to one another, say they will do one thing and do the opposite (Ron), have illicit couplings (Tom) and hide their feelings, what dating ritual doesn’t have its own phrases and scripts for awkward moments? Since they’re locked together in a villa 24/7, “I’ve just been really busy lately” won’t work, so there’s an obvious need for something else to fill the void. Words mean nothing, it is actions, as season 9’s Lana would remind us, that matter, inside villa and out. The most important part of pulling someone for a chat isn’t the chat itself, but the pulling. Who can’t understand the meaning of that?