It’s day three in the Love Island villa, and things are already heating up.
They’re also kicking off and, if last night’s episode is anything to go by, getting a bit uncomfortable too.
Fans of the show will be familiar enough with Joe and Lucie, a pair who initially coupled up on day one and have since, for the most part, gotten on quite well.
However, over the past few nights Joe has flitted between being super cute and adorable to becoming insecure and panicked.
The recoupling saw Tommy pick Lucie, meaning that Joe is officially single and that the boxer and the girl he fancies are inevitably going to spending more time together – through no decision of Lucie’s nonetheless, and yet she’s the one who appears to be dealing with the brunt of Joe’s frustrations.
Following her first date with Tommy, he immediately quizzed her about how it went. He said that he didn’t know whether he’d be able to trust her anymore.
He questioned her loyalty and almost crumbled when he thought that she had kissed Tommy – an action that there would have been absolutely nothing wrong with when you’ve known a guy for three days and are taking part in a reality TV dating show.
Joe’s territorialism and quiet manipulation wasn’t lost on the audience, many of whom tweeted their own discomfort with the situation, noting Joe’s behaviour for what it was – creepy.
Nor did it go unnoticed by Lucie herself, who later told Curtis that she was feeling very guilty about the whole situation.
She cried and said that she didn’t know what to do, and that even though she had two guys fighting over her, she felt bad – despite having done nothing wrong.
Now, let’s not ignore the obvious here – Love Island is a TV programme.
It’s a show about relationships, sex, betrayal, and people crying by the pool. We watch it to have our hearts wrenched, our blood boiled, our eyes rolled entirely all the way up to heaven.
The contestants go in there with full knowledge that their eyes are going to be wandering about seven ways at once, that it’s not all going to be sun and water bottles, and that they’re probably going to end up having their heart broken.
This is what separates Love Island from regular life, the simple fact that it isn’t.
We don’t meet people on a night out and tell them that we’d go to the moon and back for them three days later. We don’t pull people for chats, share our raw feelings on a first date, and stand over fire pits deciding who we want to couple up with next.
Real life isn’t Love Island and shouldn’t be treat as such. However, that doesn’t mean that some of the contestant’s troubling behaviours haven’t been picked up on and, even more importantly, recognised for what they are.
After Wednesday night’s show, Joe was compared to (conveniently) Joe from Netflix’s You.
In the psychological thriller, Penn Badgley plays a serial killer who will do anything in his power to make a girl he meets in a bookstore his.
This includes killing her boyfriend, following her about the place, and sticking her in a cage in the basement of a bookstore when he doesn’t get his way.
Obviously, obviously, obviously, Joe from Love Island isn’t about to murder anybody. He’s not going to lock Lucie in a cage and make her stay with him forever, keeping her nail clippings and tampons in a box that he slips out whenever he’s feeling a bit lonely.
But Joe is being manipulative, whether he realises it or not. His actions may be taken out of context, edited down to a few minutes over the course of a day, but that edit is still what’s being portrayed to the audience and it’s in that edit that people are seeing behaviours that might have raised alarm bells for them in the past.
Recently, Women’s Aid listed the signs of dating abuse in their campaign, #TooIntoYou.
It focused on the insidious and often overlooked behaviours in certain relationships where a person establishes control over another.
These behaviours include making a person feel guilty for not spending all of their time with them, criticising a person’s friend group for no good reason, sending constant texts to a person checking where they are and who they’re with, accusing a person of cheating all the time, demanding access to all social media accounts and messages, and making someone afraid to end a relationship because the person might hurt themselves.
Love Island is a TV show. It’s edited to within an inch of its life, it’s partially scripted, the narratives are shaped by producers long before they’re played out on screen – but that doesn’t mean that questionable things don’t occur and that manipulation doesn’t happen.
Recognising the dangers of questionable behaviour is the first step in protecting yourself from a relationship that could be emotionally manipulative, draining, and even dangerous.
These signs are often overlooked and undermined, but they shouldn’t be. And although Joe seems like a lovely guy who probably just reacted incredibly badly to a vaguely shitty situation, his response didn’t go unnoticed – and he did not look good.
Because at the end of the day, if you’ve known somebody for three days, you don’t owe them anything.
But hey, hopefully it’s just the editing.
Women’s Aid’s full list of dating abuse signs can be found here.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article you can contact Women’s Aid on freephone 24 hours a day on 1800 341 900.
