The Lessons We Learn from Reality TV
And Why Female Friendships Rule All
Confession time: I consider myself an intellectual. I’m a smart person, I enjoy scholarly pursuits. And yet, in the last month or so I have found myself absolutely obsessed with the reality television show Love Island USA.
This isn’t just any reality TV, folks. I’ve been a fan of Love is Blind for a while now. I watched Survivor in my youth and of course, the OG reality TV shows Real World and The Jersey Shore. While they are their own brand of low brow, this show is garbage. The content is mindless, the characters are overly sexualized. I’m embarrassed to admit that I watch it, yet here I am owning it to my readers and the great people of Substack.
The Premise
For those of you unfamiliar, in Love Island, five single women and five single men live together in a villa in Fiji (doesn’t sound too bad, right?). They have to choose someone to couple up with and hopefully, eventually, go home with at the end of the show $100,000 richer.
Throughout, and especially when it seems everyone is finally in happy thriving couples, the show throws twists and turns their way. Sometimes a new single will be added into the mix (a “bombshell” to use the show’s term) who gets to steal someone’s partner, sometimes America gets to vote people off the island, and sometimes the Islanders are quite literally forced to vote one of their friends off the island (it’s brutal).
Ultimately, the couples are whittled down to a final few that America loves the most, and then one couple wins.
The Love of Love Island
For me, the islanders of Love Island could not possibly be more unrelatable. Every day the women start in the makeup room where they put on more makeup than I have seen in my life, with a skill that, in my opinion, is only possessed by cosmetology professionals. When speaking of their prospective partners they constantly refer to “their type,” “their type on paper,” or “their physical type” as one of the major defining factors in who they choose. For the record, if you lined up all my exes you’d be hard pressed to identify a “type.” They all have Instagram feeds that could rival a Kardashian. I could keep going but, in short, we are not the same.
And yet, something I have realized about myself (a strong independent woman who enjoys being single) is that I love love. (Deep down, who doesn’t?) I love rooting for the couples and seeing them genuinely happy, I love seeing the woman who has been slighted finally find someone that treats them well. Most of all, whether it’s all fake or not, I love all the love.
The Women of it All
More than the romantic relationships in the show, though, the aspect I love the most is the female friendships. The very nature of the show pits women against women and men against men. So often the women rise above this, find camaraderie in each other, and put their relationships with the other women above the couple they are in or hoping to be in. The cheer for each other, support each other, and protect each other.
This, to me, is gold. I myself have not always been a “girls’ girl” so to speak. In fact, for most of my life, I was that girl who hung out with all the dudes. My best friend from high school and college joined a fraternity, and that was my community. Most of the women I found myself friends with were the flings or girlfriends of the fraternity brothers who came and went or maybe stayed, but those were not my core friendships.
Even out of college, my male friendships were the ones most prevalent in my life. And then one day, I looked around and realized I was surrounded by incredible female friendships for perhaps the first time in my life. So many incredible female friends, in fact, that I don’t even have time for all of them and am constantly missing out on time with one or more of them.
Among the many other things that I named in my first blog post, I think I owe my current emotional success to all of these women. They are all in very different stages of their lives: some are single, some are married, some of have babies, some never want babies. But my life is so much richer because of them. Far richer than it would be if I had $100,000 in my pocket and a Love Island boy on my arm, that’s for sure.
So this post, and all the ones to come, are to all the incredible women in my life. You all know who you are <3
