How Linguistic Theory Can Explain Most of Love Island’s Shagging

What if Love Island went on all summer? And not just all this summer, all next summer, too: what if it went through winter, and the winter after, what if Love Island went on forever, with no end? It is only now, with the end rushing towards us, that Love Island feels like it has any parameter at all; only now do the dozen topless or semi-topless men and women who have been lazily shagging each other dry in a villa all summer seem white-eyed and bolt upright, attuned to the onrushing end. With no end, there is no motivation for them to hurry themselves into the rough shape of an in-love couple; there is only summer, endless summer, shagging only ever mildly interrupted by party games and high drama.

What the Love Island producers so excel at is sustaining that giddy feeling of pre-love – the butterflies stage, that smile-on-your-face insatiably horny stage that marks the start of every relationship – and sustaining it like a high note, never allowing it to fizzle into reality. This is easy to do when you are playing like clay the dozen or so exquisite model bodies of the Islanders. It is very hard not to fall in love or at least get entertainingly horny when you're in a secluded villa for eight weeks and you don't need to worry about, like, rent – can you even imagine how much the concept of rent would bum out the vibe in that villa; it would absolutely ruin it, holy god – and that's what makes it so entertaining. Love Island is a thought experiment designed to prove how horny a human being can get without any outside stress, and the answer is "exceptionally horny". The side effect of that horniness is they create their own internal stresses, to keep the stress balance tipped. This is the main takeaway from Love Island.

So, for instance, take this example: in a Lie Detector Test task this week, Camilla (posh fragile bomb exploder) sobbed about how she knew her romance could never work with Jamie (book lad CK model) because, she feels, she "isn't good enough for him". That is an example of the Love Island cast, so destitute of stress, making stress for themselves to keep their minds sane. In real life Camilla is a poised, intelligent woman with a fucking badass high pressure job, but in here she cries over self-engineered quasi-drama. Taken away from the real world, put within the confines of a villa for six weeks, forced to talk to a succession of muscular men who say "graft" a lot and roughly kiss her, she has gone deranged. All remnants of competence have abandoned her. Her poor mind, without the distraction of real life, has driven her mad.

What if Love Island went on all summer? Chris and Kem, lying around like snoozing lions, bereft of things to do. That instant-crackle sexual tension the show thrives on driven to the wind. Olivia falls in love with the 300th consecutive man to enter the villa, who is yet another roofer from Essex called "Lewis", and expresses that love by pointing to her own mouth and screaming out of it. Still no one will shag Sam. Drive Love Island to the very edges of its format and watch it fray and fall apart under the threat of real life. It can only exist in this format, in this time, under this Majorcan sun. Love Island is a product of its own context, but, like that early get-under-me first thrill of love, it can only last so long. The end, currently, is nigh. What would happen if Love Island went on all summer? Our heroes would go bored and then insane.

Depending on who you ask, Love is either a chemical imbalance, an insane rush of hormones, a series of interconnected feelings and stirrings that combine physical attraction w/ mental sympatico, the natural endgame to desire or the deep pull within all of us to form an unstoppable union with another. In Love Island, Love is what you say to someone after you've spent six weeks wanking them off at every possible angle it is possible to wank someone off at, and if you still like them at the end of that then hey, I guess that's Love. What I am saying is: Love Island Love is not the Love we know, because of the context in which it must grow. Love Island Love is severely detached from real world Love, but comes from the same basic DNA base.

I have watched a lot of Love Island now and think that Love Island Love can briefly be explained by a formula of the following parts, multiplied together within the hot cauldron of a sex villa in Spain:

HORNINESS X FAMILIARITY X LONG SLOW CHATS IN THE SUN ABOUT ABSOLUTELY FUCK ALL X ASKING SOMEONE "SO ARE YOU CLOSE TO YOUR FAMILY?" WHILE SMOKING X INSTAGRAM BLACKHEAD REMOVAL PEELS X THE SUSTAINED PURSUIT OF KNOWING THE ENTIRE DEPTHS OF SOMEONE'S "TYPE" AND SMILING SMUGLY TO YOURSELF WHEN YOU RECOGNISE ELEMENTS OF YOURSELF IN THE AFOREMENTIONED TYPE X EXOTIC PLANS TO MOVE IN TOGETHER TO A NEW-BUILD IN CHESHIRE AND TAKE BI-WEEKLY TRAINS DOWN TO LONDON TO GO TO A 7PM–9PM PRESS EVENT AT MAHIKI WHERE THEY LAUNCH A NEW KIND OF CALORIE-CONTROLLED SODA X GIGGLING AT IN-JOKES UNIQUE ONLY TO THE TWO OF YOU X THE SEXUAL THREAT OF A 6'2" GREEK BLOKE CALLED MIKE X HORNINESS, AGAIN

So Love here, in Love Island, is a Matrix-style simulation, but does that make it any less valid? No. Does that make it more fragile? Yes: Love Island producers can make and unmake Love with a single text message, or a leaked tweet, or by somehow deflecting the acoustics of the villa so one party overhears another whispering about them. Love, here, is a game as much as it is the goal. That threat of Love shattering as much as growing is what makes the show as entertaining as it is. Love Island is as much about watching those giddy vapours that come off two people when they first fancy each other as it is watching a two-week-old couple grind their relationship to death. What makes Love Island more watchable than any other show about young people fucking in direct sunlight is that nowhere else on TV do you get to see the Love sausage being so blatantly made.

If we just assume Love Island is an island nation it makes things easier, so assume Love Island is an island nation. Islanders proved this when the nation was split in two: when the boys decamped to nearby Casa Amor to all basically get off with a series of blondes, it created a divide with the initial villa, because everyone was so attached to the confines of it. A certain patriotism has already been imbued within the Islanders, a mindless love for their own home. So it is a nation, and they are the populace. Let's just assume that.

Nations need flags (that confetti photo background they all pose in front of as part of their promo shots), a shared identity (sucking on an engraved water bottle while trying to not get any liquid on their mic; yelling whenever spotty 4G coverage picks up enough for them to receive a single text message) and, most crucially, a language. Islanders have this: they almost instantly developed their own twist on English, a lingua franca that allowed them to communicate in concise terms about a series of context-dependent events (*1). And so we have:

MUGGY, adj.

A word that describes a person, situation or phrase that may be interpreted as mugging off or at least laying the groundwork for a mugging off of another person in the house, normally the nearest viable sexual partner. To use it in a sentence: "Amber used to be really muggy to Kem, but now with Gabby being A Real Fucking Snake to Marcel and Amber being actually quite sound, I think they could win it, you know, Amber and Kem, truly."

GRAFT, v.

Graft is the act of talking to someone enough that they concede and have sex with you, which in the Love Island villa is treated sort of as you would a boss in a fighting game with a clearly demarcated health bar you must erode, only instead of delivering chops and kicks you instead stare at your own reflection in their sunglasses and go, "So what you saying, then?" until they finally relent and let you spoon it in. Grafting can also go wrong. You can tell from an incredibly early stage in the graft whether the graft will be successful, and if needs be make a dignified exit from the graft, e.g: "I'm not going to spend time grafting you if you're not going to graft me back, you know?"

ON PAPER, np.

A semi-mythical state where the details of each individual in the villa's type is stored, although most people's type is only classed by a hair colour preference and one of three personality types (kind / a dickhead / "got something about her"), so all the men like either blondes or brunettes who "have something about them", and all the girls normally go for tall, dark and handsome blokes who are a dickhead but maybe this time they'll try someone who's actually nice, for once.

NB: We talk about the paper as if it doesn't exist and the Islanders are all suffering the same vivid stationery delusion, but actually they probably had to fill out extensive forms re: their own particular type before going into the villa, so actually there probably is some paper somewhere detailing who and what each person's type is, and how rigidly the person they end up shagging in the house adheres to it, so that can probably be cross-checked quite easily.

BOYFRIEND / GIRLFRIEND, n.

The highest ascendant plane two people who have fucked three times on TV can possibly get to. The act of asking someone to be their Boyfriend / Girlfriend is as complex and romantic as a full marriage proposal, like it is done over clifftop picnics or via a complicated series of texts, like it's this whole thing.

100 PERCENT MY TYPE, np.

A state of absolution that describes how much a person adheres to another person's type, and please note the Islanders only deal in binaries here, so either someone is 100 percent my type or not really my type. Nobody has ever come in and been like, "Yeah, no, I like him – I like elements of him. I would say he is maybe only 60 percent my type." That does not happen at all. It is all or nothing here. This Island is fucking cutthroat

LEAVE IT, vp.—> adj.

"Leave it" morphed rapidly from something you say 30 times in quick succession while pulling Sam's shoulder and telling him not to get into a drunken fight with Chris into something more, and now it is the primary negative descriptor in the house, e.g. the situation with Casa Amor was a little bit "leave it", and the whole day where they were given plastic babies to coddle was "leave it" too, but then they all got a drinks and body glitter party, and that definitely wasn't "leave it". (Please note that all this usage can be attributed solely to Kem, arguably 2017's first linguistic pioneer.)

The above terms will become more important than you can ever know in two to three chapters' time, so commit them to memory now.

Jessica "Jess" Shears was on Love Island for approximately 21 days this summer, and since being booted out of the show has turned her life into this incredible piece of performance art / a sort of endurance sport to see how many #spon posts one human can place on Instagram before having their account suspended, and I for one fully admire that. Jess already had 1 million Instagram followers before Dom had come out of the house, and was subjecting those patient people to a near non-stop feed of bikini shots (actual caption: "Gutted I'm not in the villa wearing @unique_avenue swimwear #ad", which you have to admire because she turned a bikini sponsorship on its head by saying how disappointed she was not to be wearing a bikini, like look me in the eye and tell me this girl is not a genius), teeth whitening products ("Just started using this BLACK toothpaste from @diamondwhites1") and detox teas / drinks ("Much needed after a heavy few days!") even before she could get Dom, shirtless and squinting off into the distance, standing on a roof pretending to enjoy juice.

Jess, of all of the house, most recognises the mayfly-like nature of Love Island fame. Of last year's contestants, the couple who lasted longest and are arguably the most famous still are Olivia and Alex, who turned their fleeting fame into a series of affordable fashion lines and pre-planned paparazzi shoots in Dubai, and know for sure their power as a couple is more than the sum of their parts as single humans, and they have new teeth and new cars and new 30 percent Missguided discounts for their fans, and they have dogs, and Jess wants all of that and more. Are the Islanders in there for fame? It's sort of hard to tell. I'm never sure it's their primary motivation for being in there, just a happy by-product of spending an eight-week summer shagging in the sun. But for Jess it is. And if any of the winning couples are going to turn their fleeting fame into enduring Instagram ad-sponsored paydays, they'd do well to take a leaf out of her playbook.

If you have watched for six weeks as Olivia Attwood tries to fall in love with Chris Hughes then you will recognise that she is the most relatable character currently on TV. Because you have to hand it to Chris: he is essentially a perfect human, a wonderful boy-man. He has twinkly blue eyes like a beautiful husky. When clean-shaven he basically looks like an androgynous New Romantic frontman. He loves his family and his farm animals. He's always smiling and rapping, chuckling away. He has, according to all reports, a frankly unviably gigantic penis. What I am saying is I am in love with Chris, and you should be too.

Olivia, however, is struggling. This is because Olivia is one of the few persons in the house who has not fully embraced the concept of Love Island Love and is instead hanging on by the nails to Real World Love, and is caught in a foggy grey area in between, and is confused about that. Watch her scream in Chris' beautiful placid face and know she can only do this because she is so incomprehensibly horny for him. Watch her dump him for the third time in seven days behind mirror shades, then sob in a bed alone about it and know she only expresses herself this way because love is extremely maddening.

We assume the Islanders are in the house because they are exceptionally good at love, because they are professionals at it, but it's actually the complete inverse: so many of them tell the cameras they have had boyfriends or girlfriends before, sure, but this weird off-the-diving-board feeling of weightlessness is something they've never felt in their lives. They are actually shit at love, and only on Love Island to find it because they never previously have. The villa is essentially a rehabilitation centre for hardened shaggers. Watch Olivia not know how to love Chris, a man made of sweetness and dick and muscle, and know this.

We'll keep this quick, but just to keep a handle on the evolution of Reality TV Shagging through the ages:

There was someone in there called "Rob" this year. I am serious about this. I know, I know: this is coming as news to most of you. But I am serious. There was a guy called Rob who was in there for – no, I am not fooling around! I am not kidding you! – like four entire days. He was Irish. Rob. I'm being deadly serious about this. Rob!

INCIDENT ONE: In the Lie Detector Test episode this week, hairdressing spaniel boy Kem asked hard-faced dancer Amber if he was the best lover she'd ever had. Her answer was pragmatic: "No," Amber said, "but he has the potential to be." Taken out of the confines of having to do it under a duvet so all of ITV2 doesn't see your bopping arse, Amber said, given a free swing at the champ, and yes, maybe Kem could be a chart-topping lay. But not here, not in the villa, because he's not ever had the space to really work on it. Kem's response was succinct: he yelled "MUGGY!" and hugged a cushion.

INCIDENT TWO: A couple of days before, Kem and Amber had sex, and in his post-match report the next day Kem excitedly whispered to Chris that, either during the final stages of the sex or immediately after, Amber had grabbed Kem and told him he was the best she'd ever had. Kem was very proud about this moment, visibly beaming, which is really funny now after it has been scientifically proven to be false.

This whole back-and-forth gave some insight, though: that Kem from Love Island views sex as a contact sport, and a contact sport he can win. To Kem, sex has a clearly defined scoring system, with every girl carrying within herself always a constantly-updated sexual league table that it is possible for him to top. Points are awarded for effort and duration. Kem is convinced that if he bangs hard enough or fast enough or bangs at the right angle enough, he can win at sex. Kem is determined to win at sex. Even if he doesn't win Love Island, he will do that. So fucking help him. He will win at sex.

SCENARIO: It is a nice evening, a nice balmy summer evening, and your friend texts and says a few of them are going out and that you should come, and you hadn't thought about going out tonight but now you've thought about it for literally one second you Really Want To Go Out, and you feel that sort of in-your-gut crackle that this is going to be a good night. And so you take care getting ready: you iron your clothes and spend time over your hair and wash your face and apply make-up, if that is your thing, and put your best shoes on and spritz yourself with your favourite scent, and all in all when you look at yourself in the mirror one shower and an hour-and-a-half later you must admit that you look capital-f Fuckable, possibly the most Fuckable you've ever been, certainly the most Fuckable you've felt in a while. Perhaps you say "I'd fuck me" into the mirror. Perhaps you do not.

So you meet your friends – and I promise we are getting to the scenario – and you all start at the pub (it is a short walk from your house and you arrive there at just the right time, i.e. when they are already two drinks deep and you are buzzing from a pre-game tinny) and then one drink turns into three and someone suggests a club night where they know the promoter, i.e. can get you in for free, and someone else gets the Uber and you all pile in and go to the club.

And when you get to the club you have another couple of drinks to the point that you are feeling free and light enough to, for example, dance and sing and request songs from the DJ and put your bag down for a bit without worrying about it. You are that exact perfect combo of mellow and hype, and you go to the bathroom and look yourself in the mirror and damn through it all you are still looking absolutely I mean wildly Fuckable, and then you go out and into the club, into that greasy smoky-green light in the club, through the thrubs of music, through the pink glare of the lights, and you lock eyes with a real 10/10 attractive human you want to have immediate and grotesquely acrobatic sex with—

THE SCENARIO: You have to cold-approach this 10/10 sex human and start out of nowhere a conversation with them and, after about 20 minutes of aforementioned conversation, turn this conversation into Getting Off With Them, and after about 40 minutes of that you have to turn the conversation into An Extremely Handsy Uber Ride Back To Theirs, and after that you need to turn this whole mess into Thirty To Forty Minutes Of Pretty Good Foreplay Actually And Then Maybe Some Full Penetration But At The Very Least A Cumshot.

So:

How do you feel about the prospect of the above?

• I am filled with astonishing I mean world-endingly crippling dread about talking to a strange human who knows I want to cum on them or have them cum on me
• I am spectacularly OK with all of the above, Woo-Hah, Let's Get Cummy, Baby!

Because I would suggest that maybe 90 percent of the general population are more a Type 1. kind of person than a Type 2. – it is just very awkward, to talk to someone, cold, both of you knowing that the not-even-secret agenda to this conversation is to see each other's genitals – apart from literally every person in the Love Island villa, who are Type ii. And this is interesting: this is the crucial dynamic that underpins the entire show, without which we would have nothing. If everyone in Love Island was like you, or me, it would just be a silent hollow villa with a load of people tweeting sly screenshots of each other they took on Tinder. But Love Island is a villa of icebreakers, men and women who have absolutely no qualms about walking up to one another in swimwear and engaging in flirty conversation, or touching each other's arms, sucking seductively through straws, smoking and having 40-minute conversations about what they do, where they go out, what their type is, do they want kids, then putting each others' tongue in one another's mouths and fucking. What I am saying is everyone in the Love Island villa is an absolutely pro-level shagger or flirter, and my theory is this is intrinsically linked to the language they use to describe aforementioned situations that lead to a shag and / or flirt.

The language we use both fundamentally shapes the way of the world as we see it and is symptomatic of the way we see the world. Example: toddlers, learning the language, often engage in overextension, whereby they might learn the properties of a table – wooden, solid, flat-topped, four legs – and apply it to a chair – the same, but with a back bit on it – and loop both things under the umbrella term "table". So until a toddler learns about the concept of a chair, and it being separate to a table, because it has more or less the same properties as a table, a table – to a toddler – is just a big chair, and vice versa. Example two: in Modern Greek, there are multiple names for shades of blue. One (γαλάζιο, roughly galázio) describes a light, sea-coloured blue, and the other (μπλε, roughly ble from the French bleu) describes something nearer to navy, and studies have shown Greek speakers perceive the two different shades as being distinctly different rather than just two variations on the same colour, i.e. because the language has separate words for separate shades of what is widely thought of as being the same colour, there is a definitive effect from language on the perception of colour by the speaker. Example three: Kem shagged Amber in Love Island because he grafted the fuck out of her.

Love Island Islanders operate on a different RPM. They are able to shag and fall in love the way they do because they are like top athletes, only instead of a game they have a sort of competitive sexual mechanic at play. They are able to shut off that critical inner voice, they are able to bypass the mind, they are able to function on smooth muscle-memory alone. To us they spout clichés, but they are actually running key subroutines that allow their brains to kick into autopilot and their bodies to flirt and function without them. Would you be able to pull in the Love Island house? Christ. No. Look at you. Listen to you. But they do it like they are fishes swimming in water.

In the midst of a Majorcan garden, beneath the beating of the sun, they are able to eat fruit off some dude's six-pack or get to second base with a girl with an intricate bikini wax seconds after meeting her. They don't even know they are doing it: often, they briefly come to in the middle of a make-out, not even knowing how they ended up there themselves (Marcel, Casa Amor). And they can do this because of the way they see the world – in terms of mug, and graft, in 100 percent and 0 percent, in that eternal search for the type, written as it is on paper though it may as well be in stone, text, girlfriend, boyfriend, little bit leave it, the idea that any ill can be fixed by taking someone to the upper smoking area and saying I Love You. They are able to shag each other in digestible clips to be presented by Caroline Flack not because they are idiots, but because they are gifted, and this is how that gift expresses itself (*2). Their language is not a symptom of a simple mind but an expression of a finely tuned one. The moral of Love Island is this: if someone mugs you off, that's a little bit leave it. But if you graft someone just right, then lo: true love awaits you. True love and a load of Instagram endorsement deals to sell pea protein.

@joelgolby

(*1) You know how American-English is different to UK English because we sent some of our sinners on a boat and left them to develop it on their own for 250 years? Yeah. Another glimpse as to what would happen if we ran the Love Island experiment for a thousand years. Theo would become their Trump.

(*2) Side-theory: under any other circumstances, Craig would have excelled at this, because he essentially went in the villa to make eye-contact with whoever would have him and then he would barrage them by saying "YOU KNOW YOU'RE REALLY INTERESTING I JUST LIKE TALKING TO YA" for 48 straight hours until they relented and fell in love with him, but sadly he latched on to the sole outlier in the entire villa – artist-brained, soft-hearted bomb posho Camilla – and though she nearly went for it she didn't actually go for it, and eventually mugged him off. Theory dictates that if Craig went in to Love Island 2K18 he would win the entire thing.