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 reality dating shows as trashy: clearly image‑centric, invested in a narrow, normative ideal of attractiveness, overwhelmingly heteronormative, mononormative, and built to glamorize drama. If I’m honest, I was often judgmental of friends who were addicted to shows like The Bachelor, Married at First Sight, or Love Is Blind.
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. I had to revise my assumptions and judgments.
What surprised me was not the drama, but the degree of emotional exposure and honest communication. Beneath the oversized drama and neon lighting, I found something closer to a cultural laboratory—one that puts jealousy, romantic competition, communication, and intentional 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, backgrounds, and relationship styles.
Yet, for all the ways Love Island can be dismissed as shallow or voyeuristic, I sincerely found myself appreciating the bluntness and honesty with which participants are asked to face emotions many of us spend our lives avoiding: jealousy, comparison, sexual possessiveness, fear of abandonment, and—occasionally—compersion.
A Mononormative Experiment—with Polyamorous Wisdom
In its early stages, Love Island is essentially a polyamorous resort where everyone is dating everyone else. Participants are forced to confront questions that are central to non‑monogamy, but are rarely discussed openly in monogamy:
How do we handle comparison around attractiveness?
How do we build friendships in spite of dating the same people?
How do we manage jealousy and envy?
Is it possible to experience compersion when someone is getting what YOU want?
Casa Amor exists almost entirely to provoke the kind of jealousy, comparison, and reckoning that polyamorous folks often speak of having to confront on the daily. And, just like in non-monogamous communities, what Love Island does particularly well is frame jealousy not as a personal failing, but as a predictable response to uncertainty, attachment, and perceived threat.
Beyond the ruptures, drama, and mononormative premise of the show, participants often, remarkably, model true growth and relational maturity. They have 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!
Compersion, Even Without the Word
Every so often, a contestant does something unexpected: They pause. They breathe. And instead of lashing out, withdrawing, or shaming their partner for exploring another 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 practice in their own dating and relationship lives (whether they are monogamous or non-monogamous). This is the brave work of cultivating compersion when it’s hard. Emotionally, this is radical.
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, when participants regulate jealousy without turning it into control or punishment, or support each other when their “partner” goes on a date with a newcomer.
Pushing the Edges of Monogamy
What makes Love Island compelling isn’t that it promotes polyamory—it doesn’t—but that it stages emotional dilemmas that are familiar to all of us. Contestants are asked to tolerate ambiguity, care deeply without certainty, witness a partner’s attraction to others in real time, and decide whether love means possession or freedom.
These are the same questions people wrestle with in long-term monogamous relationships, open relationships, and everything in between. Love Island turns these 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 daringness and wisdom that surfaces within the show’s deeply normative framework.
