Strapped to a lie detector in the final week of Love Island, contestant Dom was asked a simple question.
“Did you come here just for a root?”
“No,” the hunky project manager said.
The machine beeped. A lie!
What struck me about this scene was not that a young, virile 26-year-old man might come on a TV show to get laid, but the outrage and disapproval of the other contestants, all of whom by that point (including Dom) were in “couples”.
The scene also reminded me of Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 surrealist movie The Lobster. In that film, being single is a crime. Those left without a partner are sent to a joyless seaside hotel where they must find “love” and couple up within 45 days. If that deadline passes, and they are still alone, they are turned into an animal.
The sinister similarities between Love Island and The Lobster are worth exploring. Yes, one is a trashy reality TV show with the 2018 launch in the UK watched by a record 3.4 million people. The other a niche, if critically acclaimed, arthouse film. Yet both Love Island and The Lobster are successful because they touch on a raw nerve: our desire to try to control the single experience even as we claim to celebrate it.
In the bubble of Love Island – which finished in Australia last week; the UK series runs until the end of this month – there is no worse insult than accusing someone of “playing the game”. The unofficial motto, consistently uttered by islanders, is that this is “love island, not friend island”. (Or, indeed, “fuck island”.)
Contestants judge each other by one main criterion: that they are there for the “right reasons”, namely to find an authentic, old-fashioned, monogamous relationship.
Meanwhile, moral authority – not to mention the final cash prize – are given to successful couples. Winning is about moving from the apparent purgatory and pain of being alone to the virtuous delivery of partnering up. The latter, Love Island seems to suggest, is the only route to salvation and, critically, social harmony.
In western countries today we have more single households than ever before: 45% of adult Americans are single (some 109 million people); in Canada, according to the 2016 census, one-person households overtook those living with partners for the first time in history. (In Australia, by comparison, single-person households made up 24% of the population in the 2016 census. In England and Wales in 2014, 33.9% of people aged 16 or over were single.)
Marriage is now a nicety, not a necessity.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Social psychologists such as Bella DePaulo, author of Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatised and Ignored, are debunking long-held truths that singles are unhealthier and die earlier than their married counterparts. Singles, research shows, are in fact more active in their communities, more social, and value meaningful work more. They also have more sex.
But while we claim to be OK with an ever-increasing army of singles, society still judges and pillories those who walk alone. Even popular culture’s most celebrated singletons – from Carrie Bradshaw to Bridget Jones – were obsessed with their happily ever afters.
So, if the unprecedented numbers of singles constitute a crisis, what is there to do about the tens of millions stuck in “purgatory”? Love Island is addictive in large part because it offers a novel solution, an experiment the entire world can get behind.
Both Love Island and The Lobster feature groups of singles cracking under the pressure of a top-down enforced deadline. In both, scenarios are deliberately set up to facilitate matches: in Love Island, it’s games; in The Lobster, a stilted dance. Finding love is not about pleasure, exploration and the journey, but an end result. More than that: love is something one must do in order to survive.
In Love Island singles couple up to try to form lasting relationships. Those who are left without partners in the frequent “recoupling” ceremonies are “dumped” from the island and forced to walk away, often in tears, as the cameras lap up their distress. Not only do they have to be in a couple; they have to fight to be the best couple, with the winners of the $50,000 prize (£50,000 in the UK) voted by the public.
Lanthimos’ film takes this conceit a step further. One girl, with a mane of thick flaxen hair, is transformed into a Shetland pony. The fleshy, pale anti-hero David, played by Colin Farrell sporting a droopy moustache and dreary glasses, has plans to become a lobster.
Of course, Love Island lionises love. The Lobster, by contrast, is sceptical and scathing about romance. But both – whether condoning the concept or sending it up – draw on society’s dominant narrative that one needs a partner to be complete. What’s more, they seem to say, the proliferation of singles is scary, a calamity we must work at together to fix.
People are buying into this narrative, too. This year, 80,000 hopefuls applied to appear on Love Island in the UK. (That compares with just 19,400 people who applied to go to Oxford.) Sure, most are looking for a quick route to fame. They are also, as a producer friend who works in reality television told me, nearly always also genuinely looking for love.
I don’t believe this desire should be penalised. But it is worth thinking about what the true cost of fetishising coupledom is.
The Lobster acts as a warning. Taken to its most extreme end point, those in the film who “fail” to fall in love are denied their very right to be human. Some run away to join a group of outlawed singles (known as “loners”, they are gunned down and captured).
Becoming a beast is no escape either. For as the clipped, matter-of-fact hotel manager tells David: “Just think, as an animal you’ll have a second chance to find a companion.”
