This is the reality of life for Love Island couples after the show
Although this iteration of Love Island has been, as someone in the Cosmo office put it, “potentially the most loveless season ever”, it’s still had its fair share of couple-swapping, secret snogs on the terrace, and, er, Joey Essex. And, as it draws to a close, it’s looking like there’ll be some strong couples leaving the villa together — as well as some who’ve already left (looking at you, Harriett and Ronnie).
But even though not everyone can bag that £50k prize fund — which looks set to go to the villa’s longest-standing couple, Ciaran and Nicole — there’s still a lot at stake for this year’s duos. Which is to say: it’s a very lucrative business being part of a reality TV relationship, if you can maintain it.
Celebrity weddings have been plastered in the pages of weekly gossip mags since the invention of weekly gossip mags, but, with reality TV hitting fever pitch over the last decade — largely thanks to Love Island, whose contestants tend to skyrocket to nationwide superstardom — there’s now big-money brand deals, follow-up reality shows, and even bigwig job titles on the table, too. Sure, all of these things are on offer to single reality stars, but if you want to get the biggest buck for your bang, you’ll usually get it as a couple. Just look at some of the highest-earning reality stars in recent history: Molly-Mae Hague and Tommy Fury, Sam Thompson and Zara McDermott, Olivia and Alex Bowen, the list goes on.
And yet, while there are major monetary benefits to living out a relationship in the public eye, there are also, unsurprisingly, downsides. To be a full-time influencer couple, you have to offer yourselves up to full-time public scrutiny — something that, combined with the precarity of having your career tied to your dynamic as a couple, is bound to put enormous pressure on even the most-established couples, let alone 20-somethings in a fledgling romance.
“Couples do have a lot to think about in terms of their relationship when they come off the production,” says Charlotte Armitage, a duty of care psychologist for TV productions. For example, she continues: “How much of the relationship is being cemented by the fact that there are now monetary gains from it? How do they then extrapolate how much of this is actually their real relationship and how much of it has this secondary gain in terms of what they’re doing or what they’re trying to make a career in?”
So, as a new set of Love Island alumni are about to embark on this exhilarating, intensive, and erratic journey, we wanted to find out: what is life really like for reality TV couples once the cameras stop rolling? Are there benefits to having a partner going through the same life-altering transition as you? And what are the challenges of starting a new relationship under the prying eyes of millions?
“One of the hardest things is the dramatic life change overnight,” says Olivia Bowen, who was crowned runner-up of Love Island season two (2016) alongside her now-husband Alex Bowen. “We didn’t see any of it getting gradually bigger and bigger, we just came out to it — from no one knowing us to millions of people knowing us. It’s a big thing to have on your shoulders, and I’m forever grateful that I had Alex by my side to go through it.” After leaving the villa, the pair went on to have a whirlwind romance, meeting, moving in together, and getting engaged all in the same year, before tying the knot in 2018 and giving birth to their first child, a son, in 2022.
“I think coming out single is actually harder,” Bowen continues. “Obviously I never did it, so I can only speak from my experience, but I had Alex with me nearly every night, going through the same thing as me. And we’d tell each other exactly how we were feeling; if there were any bad thoughts going on, we had each other to run to [for in-the-know advice]. So, yes, there’s a lot of pressure and expectations coming out as a couple, but you get to handle it together, rather than on your own.”
Davide Sanclimenti, who won Love Island season eight (2022) with his then-partner Ekin-Su Cülcüloğu, echoes this. “All of a sudden, the world not only knew who I was, but felt entitled to have an opinion about me and my relationship,” he tells Cosmopolitan UK. “It’s a very unnatural feeling, especially when people judge your life based on small snippets of a larger picture, and it wasn’t always healthy for the relationship. But through all the good and the bad, I had someone by my side. Having that mutual support and understanding was the best part. We were a team, navigating this new world together.” (Sanclimenti and Cülcüloğu split a year after leaving the villa, before getting back together and then breaking up again in January this year.)
But this loving buffer against the sudden influx of online and IRL attention can sometimes be as much a curse as it is a blessing. While single reality stars do still have their love lives heavily probed (more on that later), it’s often amped up for couples, whose relationships are meticulously pulled apart and studied by internet sleuths and tabloids alike, all of whom are looking for signs of trouble in paradise — and it’s the women who bear the brunt of this scrutiny.
“It was really hard at the beginning,” admits Bowen. “I had trust issues festering because of my previous relationships — as did Alex — so we were both a little worried. And I was always being told that I wasn’t good enough or good looking enough for Alex, so I had a lot of self-doubt, which still creeps in now. So that was really difficult because I was losing trust in him, thinking I wasn’t good enough.” Bowen explains that this is why the couple’s relationship moved so fast at first. “Partly the reason he proposed so early was because he wanted me to realise that he was serious, which I don’t think, until that moment, I really did.”
For many reality couples, and especially those who met on dating shows, there’s never been ‘normality’ in their relationships (something that, yes, they knowingly signed up for). The kinds of insecurities that plagued Bowen after leaving Love Island are purposefully exploited on the show for entertainment value, as they are on other popular reality dating shows, like Love Is Blind and Married At First Sight.
It’s rare, then, that contestants from the same season of a show get a chance to experience a more traditional kind of coupledom outside of filming — though Married At First Sight UK season eight (2023) stars Matt Pilmoor and Shona Manderson have come close. While they didn’t appear on screen together — Manderson had left before Pilmoor arrived — the pair met while filming the reunion episode, and had to keep their relationship a secret until all pre-recorded episodes had been aired.
Manderson says there were massive benefits to their romance being out of the public eye for the first few months of their relationship. “As soon as we [announced that we were together], people were like, ‘He’s too good for her’, or, ‘She’s a bunny boiler’,” she recalls. “But because no one knew that we were together, we had none of that in the beginning. We were just falling in love in our own way, like anyone in a normal relationship does. And then we were strong and united, so when [we did go public with our relationship], we’d already built this bond, so we could face all of that together.”
It wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine, though — keeping a relationship secret when you’re starting to get press attention isn’t particularly easy (especially when you do get papped together). “It did cause a lot of stress and a bit of strain between Matt and I,” says Manderson. “We had to say no to doing everything because producers said we couldn’t go together, so I ended up going to a lot [of events] on my own.”
“The minute it got announced, it felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders,” adds Pilmoor. Whether because of this grace period, or simply because viewers had never seen Pilmoor and Manderson’s romance on-screen, the pair say they’ve since gotten off relatively lightly and that their relationship hasn’t been affected by being in the public eye. In fact, their social media engagement got a healthy boost when they finally revealed their relationship. “It turned out the best way possible for us in the end,” says Pilmoor.
The labyrinth of navigating coupledom in the public eye is explored in Love Island season seven (2021) runner-up Chloe Burrows’ recent Channel 4 documentary, Love in the Limelight. In the film, Bowens speaks to reality star couples, including Pilmoor and Manderson, about how their relationships have benefited and suffered from being in the public sphere. Burrows also examines what it’s like when one of these couples breaks up, drawing on her own experience (Burrows dated her Love Island partner Toby Aromolaran for a year after leaving the villa, before they split in 2022), as well as that of former contestants like Sanclimenti. She also staged a ‘showmance’ with Too Hot to Handle star Harry Johnson to prove just how lucrative, headline-grabbing, and sometimes fake reality TV coupledom is.
“When I came out [of the Love Island villa], it was the best year of my whole life,” says Burrows. “But the one thing that’s really gotten to me is being tied to people romantically just because I’m standing with them. Like the Davide thing [in March, Burrows had to deny rumours that her and Sanclimenti were dating after the pair posted a TikTok video together] really upset me because it was so innocent. And he’d just gone through a break-up, so [the rumours] felt really disrespectful to Ekin-Su.”
This experience and the ongoing speculation about her love life, as well as witnessing the stratospheric rise of her reality couple friends, is why Burrows wanted to make the documentary. “My aim was really to peel back a layer on what goes on between relationships in the public eye and the press,” she says. “I want the takeaway to be: don’t believe everything you read. It’s also taught me that the sanctity of a relationship in the public eye does rely on how much you can keep private.”
Of course, what we see on social media isn’t a couple’s whole relationship. They’re still able to pick and choose what they show, even if they’re curating an image of total authenticity. That’s not to say this isn’t still a taxing process. Nonetheless, says Burrows: “I’d keep [any future relationship] so effing private. As far as anyone’s concerned, I’m single forever.”
Although there have been major criticisms of aftercare in the reality TV industry — particularly after a string of suicides tied to Love Island — all the contestants interviewed in this piece say that producers did do their best to prep them for what was to come, though each of them agreed that, as Bowen put it, “no one or nothing can fully prepare you”.
“By going on a show like Love Island, you’re signing up to put yourself in front of audiences with no control of the narrative or outcomes,” says Sanclimenti. The scrutiny is part of the deal, but comes with the downside of putting your relationship under a microscope. It’s something no one can ever really be prepared for — you just have to adapt and grow as things happen.”
Armitage, the psychologist, says how much contestants will be prepared for having a romantic relationship in the public eye will depend on the type of show. “If it’s a show that isn’t about dating, it’s unlikely that they will have been prepared for that as part of the pre-production psychological process,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK. “If it is a show about dating, they’ll have been individually psychologically assessed by the production, but they won’t necessarily have been assessed as a couple — because that doesn’t normally happen until the show is filming — and then there might be some aftercare to help them prepare for life outside of the production. But the extent and nature of which will vary depending on the couple.”
Although Burrows won’t be publicising any future romances again, other couples say the opportunities they’ve been given because of their relationships definitely outweigh the cons of love in the limelight — as long as you stay “grounded”, says Bowen. “You just have to always remember who you are deep down,” she continues. “You get so many offers after Love Island, but don’t just do anything for the sake of it. I think Alex actually got offered a good amount of money to split up with me and go on Celebs Go Dating, but he said no — even though someone from TOWIE suggested that we pretend to break up so he could go on and get paid. That’s not who we are. You don’t have a long life; don’t live by [money].”
“Stick together and always support each other,” adds Manderson. “Because even though Matt and I [came off the same TV show], we had totally different experiences. I need to support him in a different way than how he needs to support me. Stay as a team and have each other’s backs.”
But the most key advice for this year’s outgoing reality couples? “Don’t make this your life, and don’t have an expectation that all of a sudden you’re going to be a millionaire,” concludes Pilmoor. “Just enjoy your relationship and ride the wave of opportunities that you get together.”
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