Your first kiss, the first “I love you” and your first fight are all formative parts of a relationship that most couples experience privately. But when all your firsts are broadcast to millions of people across the country, is your relationship doomed to fail before it’s even started?
On Wednesday Molly-Mae Hague announced her split from fiancé Tommy Fury, five years after they met on reality show Love Island.
The couple were seen as a rare success story that made even the most hardened of critics question whether it was actually possible to find true love on reality TV.
Now, former contestants are shedding a light on what life is really like after the cameras stop rolling – and reality TV relationship experts are sharing the secrets behind a successful coupling up.
Former Love Islanders Olivia and Alex Bowen, who became a couple and were runners-up in the second series of the ITV2 show, explain to the BBC what being in a high-pressured and highly controlled environment was really like.
“It was surreal that we were in this bubble where everything was heightened and everything happens so fast,” Olivia says.
The artificial setting can create a distorted sense of intimacy where relationships that might take months in the real world are fast-tracked.
“It was an intense environment but that helped us realise what we meant to each other quite quickly,” Olivia says, with Alex adding that it was like “being thrown in the deep end but it worked for us”.
Olivia and Alex, who have a son, say that “of course some people are there for fame”, but they are “proof that genuine relationships can come from these shows”.
Over the past decade, reality dating shows have soared in popularity – there’s everything from Married at First Sight where couples meet for the first time at the altar to Love is Blind where dating takes place blindly in pods, or simply Naked Attraction, where you really do see it all.
But, the premise of putting ordinary people into extraordinary environments remains the same.
‘Fighting for airtime’
Nabila Badda, a contestant on the same series as Molly-Mae and Tommy, says that in her experience, the environment was “artificial and forced” with everyone “fighting for airtime”.
“I could definitely feel that some were on there for the fame over love,” she says, suggesting that there’s a desire to stay in the game rather than pursue genuine connections.
With a record 3.6 million people tuning in to Molly-Mae and Tommy’s season, compared with just 570,000 in the first series, the show’s popularity has put it under heavy scrutiny.
Following the deaths of previous contestants Mike Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon and others such as Georgia Steel and Zara Lackenby-Brown speaking out about online trolling, the show has introduced a social media ban along with a host of other welfare measures.
As contestants on Love Island are encouraged to form romantic connections quickly and are not always genuine, cracks can start showing in couples almost immediately after the cameras are switched off.