Jealousy and Compersion on Love Island
By Marie Thouin, PhD
Reality TV rarely gets credit for emotional complexity. As an academic—and as someone who has long identified with “alternative culture”—I used to dismiss dating shows as trashy. Too image‑centric. Too invested in a narrow, normative ideal of attractiveness. Overwhelmingly heteronormative, mononormative, and built to glamorize drama. If I’m honest, I was often quietly judgmental of friends who were devoted to The Bachelor, Married at First Sight, or Love Is Blind. What a waste of time and brain cells, I thought!
Then a media outlet reached out to ask for my take on Love Island—and what daters might learn from it. Which meant I had to actually sit down and watch.
What surprised me was not the drama (there’s plenty of that), but the degree of emotional exposure. Beneath the editing and neon lighting, I found something closer to a sociological and cultural laboratory—one that puts jealousy, romantic competition, communication, and emerging forms of relational maturity directly on display. Topics I happen to be deeply invested in.
My critiques didn’t disappear. These shows still pedestalize a narrow range of bodies, orientations, and relationships. But I also found myself appreciating the bluntness with which participants are asked to face emotions many of us spend our lives avoiding: jealousy, comparison, sexual possessiveness, fear of abandonment.
In its early stages, Love Island is essentially a polyamorous resort where everyone is dating everyone else—until they aren’t. Participants are forced to confront questions that are central to non‑monogamy, but rarely discussed so openly in monogamy:
How do we handle open comparison around attractiveness?
How do we build supportive friendships in spite of sexually desiring the same people?
How do we manage jealous impulses?
Is it possible to experience something like compersion—even within a monogamous framework?
For all the ways Love Island is dismissed as shallow or voyeuristic, it reliably circles back to some of the most difficult relational themes we face in real life: jealousy and comparison, attachment anxiety, sexual possessiveness, friendship, and—occasionally—compersion.
A Mononormative Experiment—with Polyamorous Wisdom
At its core, Love Island rests on a firmly mononormative foundation. Pairing up is the goal. Contestants are encouraged to “explore connections,” but within tight constraints: dates are tests to desired monogamous outcomes. Couples who display the most monogamous behaviors, and aren’t “tempted” to venture out on other dates are elevated and appreciated for causing less strife.
Jealousy fuels Love Island, and Casa Amor exists almost entirely to provoke jealousy, rupture, and reckoning. The spirals of comparison when a new prospect enters the room isn’t subtle: it’s somatic and immediate. Are they hotter? Smarter? More interesting? The moral confusion of not knowing whether you’re “allowed” to feel upset when exclusivity hasn’t technically been established is deeply relatable to modern dating dilemmas.
This is where polyamorous wisdom comes in as balm: What Love Island does unintentionally well is frame jealousy not as a personal failing, but as a predictable response to uncertainty, attachment, and perceived threat.
Every so often, a contestant does something unexpected. They pause. They breathe. And instead of lashing out, withdrawing, or shaming their partner for exploring a connection, they say something like: I want you to do what feels right for you—even if it’s hard for me. Or, I’m nervous, but I don’t want to hold you back.
These courageous conversations are the kind of communication I teach my clients to have in their own dating and relationship lives, particularly in non-monogamous settings. This is the radical work of cultivating compersion when it’s hard.
Often, we witness participants supporting one another in community and developing sincere friendships—which is another pillar of polyamorous wisdom.
Compersion, Even Without the Word
Compersion is often associated with consensual non‑monogamy, but at its core it isn’t a structure—it’s a capacity. The capacity to stay emotionally present when someone you care about experiences desire, connection, or intimacy that doesn’t center you.
On Love Island, this shows up in relational and communal settings: regulating jealousy without turning it into control or punishment, supporting other contestants when their “partner” goes on a date with a newcomer, having open conversations about emotions, boundaries, feelings, and desires. People aren’t allowed to ghost, avoid, or escape difficult emotional dynamics: if everyone dated like this, we would have a better dating scene!
Pushing the Edges of Monogamy
Beyond the entertainment value of the drama and conventionally attractive contestants in swimsuits, people watch Love Island because the emotional scenarios feel familiar. Most of us have felt threatened by comparison, wanted exclusivity and freedom at the same time, wondered whether jealousy signals love or insecurity, or struggled to support someone else’s romantic and sexual desires when it activated our own fear.
What makes Love Island compelling isn’t that it promotes polyamory—it doesn’t—but that it repeatedly stages emotional dilemmas monogamy alone can’t neatly resolve. Contestants are asked to care deeply without certainty, tolerate ambiguity, witness a partner’s attraction to others in real time, and decide whether love means possession, choice, or mutual freedom.
These are the same questions people wrestle with in long-term monogamous relationships, open relationships, and everything in between. Love Island simply externalizes them, turning private reckonings into public rituals.
While I would love to see future seasons embrace queerness, body diversity, age diversity, and genuine relationship diversity—including non-monogamous outcomes—I can still appreciate the emotional daring and relational wisdom that surface, almost in spite of themselves, within the show’s deeply normative framework.
