The Trophy Abs and Soul Ties of “Love Island USA”

One good way to enjoy the latest season of “Love Island USA”—the seventh, in which new episodes aired on Peacock almost every day for six weeks and just wrapped up—is to imagine that you have made the questionable choice to pursue a new relationship by appearing on the show. You’re flown to Fiji—nice clime, clear water. Suddenly, you’re no longer allowed to wear the usual sort of torso-obscuring shirt, unless it’s totally unbuttoned in order to display your trophy case of abs. (You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t spend some fascistic percentage of your waking hours in the gym.) Around your waist, you’re wearing a fanny pack full of recording gadgetry; hanging from a thick cord around your neck, like the statement gem on an avant-garde necklace, is a microphone covered in fuzz. You can’t hide the evidence of TV production and also be as naked as this particular production insists that you be, and so even as you walk around in your seemingly realistic way, kissing and telling and sleeping in a room full of couples squirming under the sheets, you are also a perpetual visual reminder of our growing habit of surveilling while also being surveilled. You’re here to meet and consort with a harem of other hotties, all pining equally for an experience of love, and to do so—hence all the equipment—in front of an audience of millions who get to vote along the way, determining, ultimately, the winning couple.

Your fellow-contestants are from all over the United States (plus a couple of foreigners), and have all kinds of jobs. One’s a rodeo performer. Two are nurses. It almost goes without saying that a few work as models on the side. One guy runs an after-school program for kids. He and another man—among the most conventionally “successful” of the group—used to play pro basketball overseas. You meet the gang and start to pair off; soon, you’re speaking in an odd “Love Island” patois. (The show is a spinoff of a version in the U.K., but why the British lingo proved so durable as the franchise crossed the Atlantic is a mystery.) To talk with another person, for instance, is to “pull” him or her “for a chat.” “Cuddling” seems to mean any activity involving nighttime touching, from big-spoon-little-spoon sleeping all the way to the threshold of sex.

We hear a lot these days about the atrophy of attention spans, and what it portends for sundry forms of culture and art, but here we have a nonfiction narrative, more than thirty hours in length, whose whole substance is meeting and chatting and cuddling. Contestants decide to get together and decide to cut ties—and sometimes they meet somebody new (in this dimension, a late addition to the cast is called a “bombshell”) and set off on a different romantic adventure.

The show is filmed in the South Pacific, but the villa where the action goes down, soaked in pink and aqua light from neon bulbs, is designed to look like a hallucinated version of Miami, which might be the spiritual capital of the parallel America that’s promulgated by “Love Island.” These people dress for the beach by day and for the club by night. They shuttle, chatting, between nooks given proper names that are displayed in brightly lit cursive signs. One of these cozy setups—the one most often smooched in, it seems—is called Soul Ties, a term I have heard only in half-woo-woo, half-evangelical Christian circles, designating the belief that to have sex with someone is to link your fate to theirs, your spirit to their spirit, in an invisible but perilous lifelong bond. One of the guys on the show this season—a tall, goofy, sweet kid named Austin, who, you may notice, just about never sits up straight—claims to have courted scores of lovers and sent thousands of nude photographs: soul ties galore.

In the course of the season, you learn lots of lessons. If you’re a guy, the first one is that you have to make a nice big breakfast for your girl. That’s the “bare minimum,” we’re told more than once. The dudes wake up early and whip up eggs and sometimes pancakes. Don’t skimp on the protein. Come up with cute dates: yoga or meditation or a spin through the little weight room on the far side of the pool. Step it up! Be creative! Sometimes you’ll be made to participate in one of the “Love Island” challenges: lurid spectacles like satyr plays, which force upon the villa denizens an organized orgy of makeouts and partner swaps, usually involving campy outfits. You end up covered in milk or some kind of goopy slime, and also saliva from so many wet kisses. The idea is to play along, but not so eagerly that it gives your favorite girl the ick.

If you’re a woman, there’s nothing more important than to be a “girl’s girl.” Come what may on the rough seas of relationships, the sisterhood among female contestants is lifesaving. A boy treats you poorly? One of the girls will be there to wipe the tears from your face and stem the sudden mudslide of your dampened makeup. She’ll impress upon you—usually rightly—that he’s a child, or that he’s giving player vibes, or that he’s been gaslighting or love-bombing or leading you on all along. Even if you’re wrong, she’ll offer you succor instead of correction. “Although I’m not the friend to feed into my friends’ delusions at all—you can ask any of them—I will feed into this one,” says Olandria, one of the funnier and cooler people in the villa, offering an impromptu manifesto on the practice of girl’s-girlism. “At this point in time, she just needs support. And I can be that support system. Even if I don’t really support your decision.” That’s love.

Olandria’s wise mix of support and withheld disapproval is directed toward a contestant named Huda, easily the most compelling figure to come through the doors of the villa this season. She’s got big brown eyes, a huge brush of black eyelashes, and a pair of cherry-red pool floaties for lips. Her face is spangled with freckles, and when she’s talking directly to the camera she’s often vulnerably pouting or downright crying. When she finds something funny, she says, “I’m screaming,” without raising her voice. She’s easily the star of this year’s show, because she’s both a cautionary tale and a questing hero.

Huda showed up at the villa with a secret. She has a child. (“I’m a mom,” she informs one of her friends, after holding out for a bit. “Mamacita?” he asks, not really processing the news.) She’s shy with the info, but still throws herself into an intense, gauchely exclusive (strict monogamy is looked down on in this milieu), and soon tumultuous pairing with a boy named Jeremiah. They’re constantly hugging and engaging in heavy petting—excuse me: cuddling—and then getting into awkward arguments that more than once conclude with Huda calling Jeremiah a bitch. Huda’s great talent is that—“screaming” notwithstanding—she is always emoting, with none of the cynicism or strategic intention of her housemates. (One of them, a dancer named Ace, is so dastardly that he should be barred from holding political office.)

Huda—open, messy, sensitive, insecure, verbally abusive, and a little bit toxic, sure, but still one of the girls and therefore, by necessity, your friend—miraculously makes it to the final episode. But, saddled with another boy she can’t consistently get along with, she doesn’t pull off the win. (That distinction goes to a mostly boring boy named Bryan and a nice girl named Amaya, whose ego was bruised by a short coupling with Ace but who keeps rising like a phoenix.)

That’s the thing about this show. It’s about the friends and the love matches you make in the villa, one on one, but, before long, America’s teeming waves of restless voters come rudely into the frame. “I feel like America fucking hates me,” Huda cries one night. “America, you tore us up with that one,” Olandria says after one particularly wrenching elimination. They’re both right to be wary, even resentful. America will steal your girl and hurt your feelings. America will disappear your closest friends. But don’t worry. You’ll see them on the other side. Smile! Wave to the camera! Live to cuddle another night. ♦