The Healing Power of Love (Island)

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From The New York Times, I’m Anna Martin. This is Modern Love. And today’s essay is about the TV show “Love Island.” There are so many reality dating shows out there, and “Love Island” is like a lot of them. There’s a group of single hot people in very little clothing trying to find a genuine connection.

But the thing about Love Island is that when it’s on, it’s on every single day.

There are hours of breaking up and making up and hooking up.

It started in the UK. But now, there are spin-offs in a bunch of different countries. So basically, Love Island is its own world, with die-hard fans. The author of today’s essay is one of those fans, and I am not. I find Love Island so intimidating, just the sheer volume of it. But I wanted to understand the show because it’s such an important part of today’s essay. So I looked around me, and I found the most Love Island-obsessed coworker I could find.

Hello.

Lindsey Underwood, you are an editor on the styles desk, but I would say you’re actually the preeminent Love Island authority at The New York Times.

Wow, I mean, put it on my tombstone. That’s a legacy that I would love to carry on with me, yes.

My first question really is about volume. Why are there so many episodes in a season of Love Island?

OK, so the way Love Island works is that there are a bunch of single people who are put into a villa in Spain.

Who are very conventionally attractive. They are mic’d 24/7. And they all need to couple up, and by the end of the summer, be the last couple standing.

You’re really seeing a daily update on where these couples are standing. So you see the couples develop over time. And sometimes, you really can tell that these people are falling for someone. And to see these people really put it all out there on the line and everyone to take it so seriously, I think, is sort of refreshing for a romantic like me. Don’t repeat that. But I think I am secretly a romantic.

I love how Lindsey can look past the chiseled bodies and the silly challenges and all of that mugging for the camera to see genuine emotion. The author of today’s essay also found something real in Love Island. In fact, the show helped Sophie Mackintosh get through one of the darkest points of her life. Here’s her essay, read by January LaVoy.

The summer my life turned upside down, I did not miss an episode of Love Island. It didn’t matter how late I got home or how terrible I felt. When I was especially tired or lonely, I fell asleep watching it. And when I woke up, I opened my laptop to see what I had missed. It was a way to ease out of one day and into the next in the spaces that I would have been chatting with my partner Chris. That summer, his side of the bed was empty.

After a week of watching, I ordered a personalized Love Island water bottle and took it with me on the bus and the subway. I could share knowing looks with other riders when I drank from it. Our glances were a sort of communion.

I read that inquiries into plastic surgery went up after the show started, and I was not immune. I needed distraction. So I spent time on clinics’ websites creating new anxieties for myself. Well, if I was thinking about my imperfect nose, I wasn’t thinking about the person I loved being in the hospital, and that he might die at 33.

His symptoms had started in late autumn, but we brushed them off. He was suffering a mysterious tiredness. So we ate salads and stayed in more. He didn’t see the doctor until spring. We took our health for granted. We thought we were robust. The doctor referred him for a colonoscopy, which showed something, but nobody seemed too concerned.

I looked up polyp. It was reassuring. Polyps can be removed. It takes years for them to turn into cancer. There were more concerning facts too, but you see what you want to see. The referrals started — a CT scan, an MRI, more appointments. But I tried not to see anything right up until the moment the news broke. He had bowel cancer.

It all happened within a month of the colonoscopy, which is not very long, half as long, in fact, as a season of Love Island. In a month of filming, most of the contestants pair up and start committed relationships. They move their bodies in bedclothes under the gaze of the nighttime cameras. A month is long enough for your life to change. A day is enough, 10 minutes.

Chris’s insides had been gracefully diverted by an ileostomy. Part of his small intestine was outside of his belly. He said he was an indoor water park, where the slides go outside. He’s always talking like this, this man I love. There were also tubes inside his body pushing in fluids and taking others away.

And he was euphoric with opiates. Twice within five minutes, he grabbed his nurse urgently to introduce me. This is Sophie, he’d say, his eyes strange and piercing, an oxygen pipe in his nose. I love her.

I love you too, I said. On the bus home, I thought about how Love Island would be there for me six hours a week for the next two months. That’s how long it would take for Chris’s early recovery.

As the hospital days continued, I started to invest my energy in buying new furniture and assembling it alone in front of the contestants. I had started to think of them passionately and protectively. They felt like friends, children even. Their vulnerability made me feel as if I knew them. I wept for them with genuine emotion that I was afraid to express any other way because when I did, I usually ended up lying on the carpet in our hall hyperventilating.

One night, a screw would not fit where it should in a shelving unit. There was nobody to help me. And it was 1:00 AM. On the show, the bodies of the contestants were lithe and bikini clad, their voices turned down so I wouldn’t wake my neighbors. I broke down and cried for 10 minutes, and then I used a shoe to hammer it in.

It was as if I was marooned on an island of my own with my water bottle and the small matters of survival that I had to solve in isolation. But if there were cameras following me all the time, my life would have been sad to observe. I was glad that my new friends could not see the tragic person on the other side of the screen. It gave me comfort to see these love stories taking place outside of the dirty context of reality.

May you never see the person you love with tubes running out of their body, I wished for them — these beautiful couples who were all years younger than me, though I considered myself young and too young for what was happening.

May you never the terror of your future changing before your eyes, children and homes and plans evaporating. May your futures be symmetrical, adoring and sponsored as long as you live.

I envied them, their world, where the biggest problem was not quite liking each other enough or being stabbed in the back by someone they had known for three weeks. And whatever happened, there was a pool to jump into, a sunbed to lie on, a chance to try again. And yet, I was glad for them too and for the ability to revel in love stories with problems so distant from my own.

There was no ugly crying in hospital bathrooms, checking the color of catheter bags or mopping up vomit, no mashed potato or custard spooned into mouths. Only potential and the golden days of new love. I remembered those days, but there was a different love in play for me now, a wiser one. I had been unprepared for it and I had assumed that we would not be flung into it for years, decades.

Chris returned home before the end of the season. He hadn’t watched any episodes, but I’d kept him up to date on these strangers I was so attached to. We watched it ceremonially. The love story of Jack and Dani, the eventual winners, had already established itself as one of the great romances of our time. Chris held my hand as I wept. I explained that the catharsis of crying over these people had been very beneficial to me.

I remember it being a dizzying two weeks into our relationship, and I understood how quickly the contestants could fall for each other. I believed Love Island was real because it had been real for us. All those years ago, taking a long walk on a winter beach, hair in our eyes and mouths, and feeling a happiness so powerful, I believed I might die if I didn’t see it through.

Love Island ended months ago. Some of the couples are still together. Jack and Dani beam through my Instagram feed, appearing to be as accessible as couples I actually know. On a recent morning, as I got dressed, Chris said, the two blond ones broke up. Ellie and Charlie?

I’m grateful for the slow restoration of normalcy, the new skin of it, even with the pink tenderness still underneath. We are a week away from the wounds on his stomach healing. The ileostomy reversed now, by which I mean the slides are back inside the water park. We cook and talk about the future freshly aware that what can seem like the destruction of everything is sometimes just the beginning. Day by day, month by month, we face uncertainty, but are no longer marooned. We are in possession of a strange and hopeful beauty.

After the break, another story about love and healing. A woman thinks she’ll never find love because of how she looks. And then she meets someone who changes the way she sees herself. That’s next.

Up next, we have a Tiny Love Story. These are short modern love stories from The Times.

But before we get into it, I want to say that this part of our show has descriptions of a dog attack. If you need to stop listening, that’s OK.

Since she was a kid, Melissa Akie Wiley has wondered if she’d ever find love. She did find it, but it wasn’t easy. And even now, she still has to explain why she’s worth that love. Here’s Melissa.

My name is Melissa Akie Wiley, and this is my Tiny Love Story. Back when my daughter was two, she pointed to a picture of an ugly witch in a book and said, “Mama.”

I am disfigured from a childhood dog attack. I pulled the illustration next to my lopsided scarred cheeks and let my nerve-damaged smile disguise my sorrow. “Yes,” I said. “She’s a witch, but she’s good like me.”

She’s growing up in a world that believes the false binary: Ugliness means evil, and beauty means good. Now my daughter is four. She points to Halloween decorations and asks, “Are you a witch?” “No, my love,” I answer. “Your mama is a human.”

Thank you so much for sharing your story, Melissa.

Thank you for having me.

I’m wondering if you can tell me a little bit more about what happened during the dog attack.

Yes, so the dog attack happened a few days after my fifth birthday. We were visiting a friend that had two dogs. I went in the backyard to play with the dogs and my mom was cooking dinner. And the dogs attacked me. And they essentially just ripped off my face. It happened really quickly while my mom was making dinner.

And she sort of turned around, and the entire yard was covered in blood. And my face was gone. And I was immediately rushed to the hospital, where I was in intensive care for months. And when I came out, I just, you know, I didn’t recognize myself. And I’ve had over 30 reconstructive surgeries over the course of my life.

Can you tell me what it was like for you as a kid after the dog attack? How did other kids, how did they treat you?

They treated me with curiosity and cruelty, a mixture of the two. One of the things I did before I started each grade was stand up in front of the class and explain to the other kids what had happened to me and ask for their kindness and answer their questions. And what I would say was nothing is wrong with me. I’m a normal person, but I just look different. And the kids were allowed to ask questions of me then. And often, their questions were pretty harsh. They were like, I don’t like the way you look. Are you going to fix it?

Oh.

So I would just try to soothe them knowing that they were children and they wanted a happier narrative than the one I was able to give. So I gave the best I could.

But you’re a child too, right? And you’re soothing other children about this thing that was so painful, like you said, for you.

Yes, so this is just sort of a common thing. I think the same can be said for a host of disabilities. The burden often falls on the person who has experienced the trauma to soothe other people. And that is really exhausting. And I’ve wished over the course of my life for just a day where there was no comments, there was no stares, where I didn’t have to soothe the world and basically ask permission to live amongst people.

Mm-hmm. And as you got older, did your response change in any way?

I became really angry in adolescence. I would have a crush on a boy, and in one instance, I told my friend. And she told him. And he was really disgusted. And that, for me, made me feel really angry because I felt that maybe the thing I was going to be denied in life was love.

Hmm. But eventually, you did find love, right?

I did. I’m married to my husband Craig. I just never thought I’d get so lucky. I never thought I’d meet someone who accepted me. And one of the things that happened early on in our relationship is I have always worn makeup. Really, the reason is is because if I don’t wear makeup, it’s worse, you know? It’s just —

What’s worse?

The stares, the comments.

Yeah.

Without makeup, of course, the scars are red and they’re more visible. And so one of the things I was really afraid of when I first met Craig and moved in with him was taking off my makeup in front of him. And then we moved in together.

And he bought me a vanity so I could do my makeup. And he put it in the middle of the living room because we had a small apartment and there was nowhere else to put it. And I was really touched by his gift and also really terrified, like, I’m supposed to do my makeup in the living room, which means he’s going to see me without makeup. And I had been in the bathroom. And so I remember going to the bathroom and washing off my makeup and sort of preparing to come out and show myself to him.

So I walked out to the living room, and I just immediately covered up my face and started crying. And I just said, I’m so sorry. Like, I’m so sorry I look like this. I’m so sorry. And he pulled my hands off of my face and wiped away my tears. And he just said, I love you, I love you, I love you. Like, stop apologizing. I love you. I’ll love you forever.

And it was just one of the most beautiful moments of my life to just feel like I could say to someone, I’m really sorry. And that is always how I felt about disfigurement. Like, I just want to send this big apology to the world that’s like, I’m so sorry I’ve bothered everyone. And I was finally able to say that to someone. And what I got back was, I’ll love you forever.

Hmm. Melissa, your story is so beautiful. Thank you so much for talking with me today.

Thank you so much, Anna. It was a pleasure.

Modern Love is produced by Julia Botero, Christina Djossa, Elyssa Dudley and Hans Buetow. Fun fact, Hans is obsessed with Love Island, absolutely obsessed. And he served as our in-house consultant on this episode. So special thank you, Hans.

Our show is edited by Sara Sarasohn. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. This episode was mixed by Sophia Lanman. And our show was recorded by Maddy Masiello. The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music by Sophia Lanman, Roman Niemisto, Diane Wong, Pat McCusker, and Elisheba Ittoop. Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Nell Gallogly. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Miya Lee is the editor of Modern Love projects. I’m Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.