The Reality Show That Captures Gen Z Dating

The great joy of a reality dating show is watching couples evolve. You see two strangers meet and make stilted small talk. Then they loosen up, share a first kiss, look at each other with progressively gooey gazes—until they leave the show hand in hand, or one of them breaks it off and starts the process over again with someone else.

This arc is especially delicious on Love Island, an international franchise that, unlike hyper-structured shows including The Bachelor, allows fans to be freaky little flies on the wall beholding ultra-ordinary moments—contestants lounging by the pool, playing ping-pong, getting ready for bed—six days a week. Yes, that is a massive time commitment; don’t ask me how I fit it into my schedule. It also means you can see a relationship deepening almost in real time. By the end of a typical season, you have multiple pairs to follow—and any success feels like evidence that love is real, so you pray for their survival. As I like to remind my mom when she tells me it’s all scripted junk, some of these people are married with kids now.

But all of that’s been different on Season 7 of Love Island USA, whose finale will air on Peacock this Sunday. The show is a phenomenon: From June 6 to 12 alone, across just nine available episodes, viewers watched more than a billion collective minutes—outpacing 2024’s megahit season. This one has involved riveting drama, touching friendships, and meme-worthy moments. It has been lacking, though, in something kind of important for a romance competition: romance. “I’m rooting for no one because there’s no actual connection,” I saw someone complain on Reddit. Another person bemoaned that “it seems like no one is really pining for each other.” One poster, on the same thread, summed it up quite well: “It’s been Fake Friendship Island, Severely Emotionally Dysregulated Island … Situationship Island. Literally everything but Love Island.”

It’s true: Contestants have paired up—but largely never heated up. As the islanders would put it, What the helly? Maybe this cast just didn’t happen to click; maybe LIUSA has grown too popular, and now it’s overrun by influencers looking for fame rather than partnership. But I’d argue something else: that Season 7 is an illuminating portrait of Gen Z, an emotionally guarded cohort that has far less relationship experience than its predecessors, and is having notably little sex.

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This isn’t the first season with Zoomers, but the cast is strikingly young. Some members were in high school when the coronavirus pandemic hit. At a time in their life when they might have been crushing on someone in class or going on a first date, they were probably at home staring at a screen. They’ve grown up with phones and social media; perhaps they’ve seen romances performed or publicized—including on Love Island—more than they’ve actually taken part in them. Several contestants have said that they’ve never been in a relationship (though one claims to have texted more than 1,000 nude photos). If this season feels like Situationship Island, that’s because Gen Z is the situationship generation: one in which many young people believe in love and want it badly but have “a real sense of anxiety about how to go about it,” as Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life, once told me. A 2024 Hinge report described Gen Z daters as “tiptoeing around direct communication to avoid coming off as cringey or overeager.”

No wonder, then, that these islanders seem like they’re going through the motions, circling around romantic vulnerability but never quite closing in. Some have waffled for episodes on end about which prospect to pursue, then meandered toward one without much conviction. Their chats are stiff and oddly surface-level. (One of the stronger couples recently talked about their childhoods seemingly for the first time, after weeks of shooting the breeze.) A few contestants call themselves “slow burners.” But the group doesn’t just seem cautious about connection; they seem suspicious of it. When couples have gotten closer, or islanders have seemed smitten with someone new, they’ve been accused of “love bombing” or failing to do enough romantic “exploring.”

By this late in the season, we should be hearing hopeful lovers talking with nervous excitement about how they’ll fit into each other’s regular lives. Instead, the remaining pairs are either going off the rails or just starting to gain steam. Two couples had decided to be “closed off” before last night’s episode. One was Cierra Ortega and Nic Vansteenberghe, who had also made a point of confirming that they were not “boyfriend and girlfriend.” Then, on the same day earlier this week that Ortega was sent home—after fans discovered that in the past she had posted a racist slur online—Vansteenberghe did a little jig to celebrate recoupling with someone else. The other closed-off couple was Taylor Williams and Clarke Carraway, a relatively late-in-the-season linkup. The night they became exclusive, they lost an audience vote and went home.

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Despite all of this, Season 7 continues to draw millions of viewers. Multiple times in the past week, I’ve heard people in public spaces talking about the latest developments. (After Sunday, I will finally be able to roam my city without headphones on for fear of spoilers.) Maybe fans are just hate-watching, or maybe they’re eating up everything Love Island besides the love. But I wonder if something deeper is happening—if some of the Zoomers watching relate because they have their own wall up, or they’ve struggled to scale someone else’s. Maybe they recognize the hesitance they see in these islanders: all the conversations about not wanting to “move too fast,” all the studied chillness.

Maybe viewers also want to see, from a safe distance, what happens when you do put yourself out there. The two major fan favorites this year are both women who, by their own admission, feel a lot. One, Huda Mustafa, fell head over heels earlier in the season; she was messy, sometimes toxic, but she wasn’t playing it cool. The other, Amaya Espinal, cries frequently; she also tends to squeal when she’s excited about romantic potential. Men keep telling her she’s too much. One didn’t like it when she called him “babe.” (She calls all of her friends—actually, everyone in the villa—by that term of endearment.) Another man, when the contestants wrote brutally honest letters to one another, said he was overwhelmed by her interest in him. “I’m tired of people viewing that as a negative instead of a power move,” she said, tears streaming down her face in front of all the other islanders.

That speech was the season’s viral moment: Espinal gained hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers overnight, and now has 2 million. If you search “Amaya Papaya” on Google, a quote of hers streams across the screen with a little papaya emoji. The soda brand Poppi is even selling a new flavor in her name. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that viewers are responding to the people who let themselves show enthusiasm, who talk about how scary it is to fall for someone, and who go for it anyway. “Even though my heart rate is being tachycardic right now,” Espinal says in one episode, “your girl is trying to flip that anxiety into excitement.” She’s showing a whole lot of young people how it’s done.