Written By: Morgan Miles, Guest Writer

As an avid detester of all things reality TV, I dove into Love Island Season 2 expecting fake, disgustingly cheesy, emotionally stunted scenes serving as filler for a cable time slot. However, the surprising amount of authenticity drew me in. Then I fell down the hole that is falling in love with the characters, their love lives and the drama associated with young adults crammed into a villa.

Though reality television does garner valid critique from the outside world — such as the privilege of wealth and the more than obvious situational setups in Keeping Up With The Kardashians — Love Island, to someone formerly a skeptic of this genre, has proven worthy of redemption in its field. 

Keeping the audience forever on its toes, Love Island consistently introduces challenges in the forms of fun games to random recoupling, a  phenomenon where contestants choose their partner and have to suffer from the guilt of kicking the single people off the island. 

There’s never a dull moment considering the open playing field for romantic connection. Honestly, this bunch of young adults are more mature than anyone would probably think without watching the show. When there’s tension or turmoil, the couples are quick to consider each other’s feelings and address the elephant in the room. 

Cely and Johnny — one of the most popular and admired couples currently on the island — for example, have gone through distrust and nearly broke up, but ultimately decided to discuss how they both feel before making the big decision of choosing another partner. This deep, important conversation in any relationship is what brought them back together, for the better. It’s a subtle reminder within a TV show that no relationship could possibly sail smoothly amidst so much drama.

If life lessons aren’t exactly important to you when you flip on reality TV, there’s Love Island’s pun-ridden, always-excited-sounding narrator Matthew Hoffman, who does a perfect job of bordering annoying while simultaneously proving himself quite the charismatic talker.

There is also a whole cast of characters worth adoring (I may or may not be in love with Justine), watching love lives being torn apart behind the scenes and rooting for certain people to go home because they are extremely annoying (Mackenzie’s whining about how “hard” her life is in the villa can only be repeated so many times before you go crazy).

Not to mention sexual tension — if that’s your thing — between attractive men and women searching for love, yes, but also pursuing intimacy within the limitations of public filming and broadcasting of their every move. 

With only a few episodes away from the finale, there’s an added element of fear mixed with desire as each couple aims to beat every other couple in the villa for the prize of $100,000.

Those who are friends now will have their relationships tested, and America has the say in who is believed to be the best. Proving themselves is more crucial than ever before, when staying on the show before simply meant finding another person minutely interested in you. 

I highly recommend sitting down and giving the first few episodes a try. Whether Love Island piques your interest or not, investing in a variety of genres to discover new or establish old interests is a part of life that’s worth exploring. If you’re already procrastinating assignments, stressed or just lazy, it’s the perfect show to turn on. Maybe you can prepare to be on Love Island yourself someday? For love, of course.