The Real Tragedy of Love Island: Millions of People Think Anxiety Is Love

So you think you’re watching Love Island. That’s adorable. What you’re actually watching is a twenty-four-year-old woman who learned as a child that love means never being left alone, which is a terrible thing to learn because it’s completely wrong, but here we are.

Huda Mustafa shows up carrying the kind of wounds that aren’t dramatic enough for television but are too real for most people to handle in person. I’m talking about garden variety attachment trauma the kind where you walk around thinking your anxiety is actually intuition and your need to control everything is actually caring about people. Millions of people have this. Most of them aren’t on television, thank god.

She meets Jeremiah and immediately starts planning their post-villa life, which is what people do when they’re terrified of abandonment they skip the part where you get to know someone and go straight to the part where they can’t leave you. It’s not romantic. It’s not even strategy. It’s just what happens when your brain thinks everyone’s going to leave.

Watch her give him hickeys like she’s marking territory. Watch her monitor his conversations like she’s a security guard at a jewelry store. This isn’t because she’s naturally possessive (though the effect is the same) it’s because her nervous system is constantly checking to see if the other shoe is about to drop. Which it is, because this is reality television.

America votes to separate them and she says “I got slapped in the face by America.” Finally, someone tells the truth about audience participation. We were watching someone’s psychological wounds play out in real time and we voted to make it stop because watching people drown makes us uncomfortable. Who knew?

Jeremiah tells the cameras he picked someone else because his relationship with Huda was “too toxic.” He’s twenty-two and emotionally unavailable in the way twenty-two-year-olds specialize in, while she’s twenty-four and desperately available in the way people with abandonment issues always are. This is like putting a cat person and a dog person in a room and being shocked when they don’t get along.

When she finally has her breakdown (calling him names, refusing to participate in villa activities) you’re not watching someone choose chaos. You’re watching what happens when someone whose nervous system has been in fight-or-flight mode finally lands on fight. She’s not calculating this response. She’s drowning, and drowning people don’t swim gracefully.

The real tragedy isn’t that they broke up. Twenty-two-year-olds and twenty-six-year-olds with attachment trauma were never going to work out, with or without cameras. The real tragedy is that we put someone who clearly needed therapy into a situation specifically designed to trigger her deepest wounds, then acted surprised when she responded exactly like someone with her psychological profile would respond.

There are millions of people like Huda walking around out there, doing their best with attachment systems that are wired for survival instead of love. Most of them aren’t on television, which is probably for the best.

America didn’t break them up. America just voted to stop watching someone slowly drown on television.