Essay

Culture

Romance

23 March 2023

11 min read

It’s complicated: dissecting dating shows

From evening entertainment to essentially influential, TV dating shows define how many relate to each other. As a new series of Love is Blind drops, Lauren Windle explores their attraction and how to survive them.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

Looking down onto two rows of octagonal illuminated skylights over pods.

Looking down over the pods that are central to Love is Blind.

Netflix.

If you thought that my vicar’s emphatic sermon explaining why we should stay away from the likes of Love Island would stop me watching series 1-9 of the UK version, two vintage celeb series and a decent chunk of the Australian spin-off – you would be sorely mistaken.

On the face of it, reality dating shows, packed full of unobtainably attractive people using dubious techniques to secure a partner, don’t seem compatible with a life of devotion to Jesus. But, I’d like to put forward the case – with strong caveats – for us all enjoying the occasional escapism of a dating show.

A brief history

As a tabloid journalist, I’ve pretty much seen it all. My love affair with reality TV started when, as an 11-year-old, I sat inches away from the screen every weeknight just to soak in the excitement of the Big Brother house. The volume was low, which meant my mum couldn’t hear the housemates’ diary room confessions but that often I struggled to as well. I didn’t care, I just wanted to be a part of it. The most eagerly anticipated element to the claustrophobic 1984 spin-off were the love stories, Mel and Randy Andy from series one or Jade Goody and PJ from series three. We were all waiting for a romantic storyline to captivate our attentions.

Dating shows had been around for a while. We all remember the happy hattrick of ITV’s Baywatch, Gladiators and Blind Date on a Saturday night. The nation cosied up on the sofa to watch Cilla and Our Graham introduce a new couple. On the more youthful side, Davina McCall had been dashing around shopping centres and high streets trying to get people on impromptu dates on Streetmate since 1998. But with little follow up and no opportunity to immerse myself into the narrative of the love story, these held less interest for me.

That all changed with the introduction of Love Island. It started in 2005 as a show most won’t remember. In its original iteration, the tropical set hosted celebrities with a £100,000 prize for the famous pair who survived several public votes. The fame levels were modest at best, with a smattering of 90s popstar and soap actors and the mediocre-level entertainment was enjoyed for two seasons before ITV, its broadcast channel, axed the show due to disappointing ratings. I, of course, watched and enjoyed it, although 18 years on, I can only remember fan favourite Paul “Danger” Danan kicking up a fuss about something trivial.

The famed programme made a dramatic reappearance in 2015 but in the ten years between, other production companies had caught on. Novelty shows like Farmer Wants A Wife, Beauty and the Geek and Take Me Out cropped up. While others feigned interest in authentic connection like Undateables and First Dates. But still, nothing followed the relationship journey from first sight to break-up and all the messiness in between.

In order to get the press coverage required for the relaunch, the producers included one contestant who was, at best, fame-adjacent.

When Love Island came back, they had downgraded to ‘regular members of the public’, albeit the aesthetically elite, and slashed the prize fund to £50,000. In order to get the press coverage required for the relaunch, the producers included one contestant who was, at best, fame-adjacent. In the first series that was Lauren Richardson, a woman who had been at the centre of a cheating storm between One Direction’s Zayn Malik and Little Mix’s Perrie Edwards. For series two, it was Miss Great Britain, they then moved on to little known popstars, landing more recently with family members of celebrities like Tyson Fury’s brother Tommy, Michael Owen’s daughter Gemma and Danny Dyer’s daughter, also called Danni.

The first series gained some traction. There was coupling-up, heartbreak, a lot of sex and even a marriage proposal. But the show really blew up after Miss Great Britain, Zara Holland, was stripped of her pageant crown for performing a sex act on a fellow islander in series two. International media swarmed around the controversial incident and Zara was chastised for the night of passion. Alex Bowden, the male participant, was celebrated for his seduction, despite confessing to having no feelings for the model. This was when my perception of reality dating shows changed. No longer was I consuming them as an entry-level escape from reality, but because they had become influential. I realised Love Island wasn’t following the zeitgeist but setting it. Zara’s public dethroning became a feminist issue that was publicised in media outlets all over the world. From then on, ratings went through the roof and stayed at an eaves-busting level for years after.

The lexicon of love

It’s fair to say my 11-year-old rationale for consuming the easily-digestible reality TV was ill thought through, but into my 20s I knew exactly what I was doing. Love Island began to dictate the trajectory of relationships and the everyday language we use to describe them. Suddenly everyone was adopting ‘islander’ terminology like: “getting pied” (being rejected in a way that the receiver could deem embarrassing), “grafting”, “laying it on thick”, “Factor 50”, “being on job” and “putting in a shift” (all meaning courting the object of your affection), “turning your head” (being involved in some capacity with a person but transferring your attentions to another) and being “muggy” (generally disrespectful).

Another bizarre phenomenon that evolved off the back of the show is the new, previously unstated, stages of dating that I find both baffling and unnecessary. In days gone by, you met someone, you dated and you decided to be boyfriend and girlfriend, engagement and marriage may or may not have followed. These days, it is not that simple.

Its complicated

First you confirm that you’re “getting to know each other”. No longer platonic, this term signifies that you are evaluating your potential mate for compatibility but in a very loose handed and non-comital way. Next you are “seeing each other” this is where you have graduated past getting to know each other and are now dating. Reader, please note you are still not exclusive. The next stage in the marathon that is commitment, is that you say your “head wouldn’t turn” this means that, theoretically you only have eyes for the other person. Again, only the foolish would consider this a commitment. The statement can be retracted under the, not unlikely circumstances, that your head does in fact turn. If you survive this period without whiplash from all the erratic neck movements, you are in the territory of exclusivity. You are no longer “open to getting to know” anyone else and have “put your eggs in one basket”. But don’t, under any circumstances, use the term boyfriend and girlfriend at this juncture for fear of being an over-enthusiastic simpleton who doesn’t understand the social etiquette. You are still in a low commitment and decidedly fragile stage.

It’s often after this that people will say “I love you”, apparently far easier to pronounce than “girlfriend” or “boyfriend”. And finally, when the couple are sufficiently established, one party (often the male in heterosexual couples but not exclusively) will stage an elaborate proposal-style event in order to pop the all-important boyfriend/girlfriend question. Candles, rose petals, treasure hunts and any manner of other paraphernalia have been known to be involved. Exhausted? This 34-year-old wants to curl up in front of an episode of Last of the Summer Wine with a cup of Horlicks just thinking about it.

But am I pleased I understand it? Absolutely. This is how the younger people in our lives are now operating. No longer are people turning to teachers, parents or churches for advice (if they ever did). They’re take tips from bikini-clad hotties on the box. It’s the blind leading the blind.

A few years ago I was in my church and the children and youth pastor was heading out to run a Bible session at a nearby girls’ secondary school. As she left, she told me that they would be talking about Love Island. A few weeks prior, one of the female contestants had lamented the sexual relationship she had had with one of the men before he promptly “turned his head” for a new arrival. She had assumed that their shared physical intimacy was implicit of commitment and he disagreed. The teenage girls had discussed, in depth, how that would have felt under the same circumstances. They debated how to know that you are in an “exclusive” relationship and therefore able to step up your sexual contact.

Having just seen a woman desperately upset at her treatment, they were far more open to hearing about the emotional consequences of rushed intimacy. It was one of the most powerful, teachable moments she’d had with these young women, who were far more primed to learn from the regret of the influencers they admire than the “square” church leader who joined them once a week.

No, really complicated

More recently, two more shows have joined the heady heights of Love Island’s impact levels; Love Is Blind and Married At First Sight. The former is an American Netflix series where individuals are put into pods and can’t see their dates. They have ten days to romance the 15 members of the opposite sex sight unseen. Contestants only progress to the next stage, where they meet and go on holiday together, if they decide to get engaged while still in the pods. In Married At First Sight, which has a UK version but is revered mainly for its explosive Australian series, a couple is matched by an expert panel and they first meet at the altar. In response to the most frequent of all the FAQs around this show; the wedding is not legally binding so couples who choose to stay together will often have a second, legitimate ceremony. Equally the vast numbers of pairs who don’t work out, do not need to file for divorce.

We are all in a position of influence, whether that be at work, online or even just in our own homes. Therefore, surely we have a responsibility to understand the other forces that shape our world. Genuinely, whether a young person watches it or not, Love Island and these other programmes will affect the tone and expectations of their relationships, particularly romantic.

When not to watch

There is a key and very sensible argument for those of all faiths and none to avoid these shows. My vicar’s reasoning was, and still is, completely valid. What we fill our eyes, heads and hearts with is what we become. No one is immune from influence by the things they engage with. Christians are encouraged to let a lot of that stuff be good, Godly things. And to focus on that which builds us up and enhances our relationships with Him and with each other. Realistically, it’s unlikely we’ll find this enhancement through the medium of dating shows. There are a few circumstances under which I think people are best giving dating shows a wide berth.

When it comes to placing the right level of importance onto romantic love, these shows aren’t helpful.

If you are all consumed by the idea of being in a relationship and this longing is affecting your daily life – do yourself a favour and stay away. We mustn’t allow the lie that romantic relationships are the be-all and end-all to soak in. And we’re on dangerous ground when we start to believe intimacy is to be rushed to win popularity and a prizes. When it comes to placing the right level of importance onto romantic love, these shows aren’t helpful. They don’t celebrate the incredible joy and value of being single – if you don’t “couple up”, get engaged in the pods or decide to stay in your first-sight marriage, you’re out. That’s not what, as a Christian, I believe.

Being single is not a stage to “graft” your way out of. You’re not less valuable if you’re not picked to “couple up”. The Bible is really clear that whether for now, or for your life, being single comes with benefits and, in many ways, is preferable to being in a relationship. The key role-models that Christians hold dear as examples in our faith; Paul, John the Baptist and even Jesus himself, were single. Getting into a relationship isn’t “winning” or “levelling up”, it’s exchanging one state with its perks and challenges for another state with its perks and challenges. Being single does not demonstrate inferiority or unattractiveness - and those in relationships are not superior.

Second – if you are struggling with your body image. Be kind to yourself and do your best to avoid the taut and toned bodies on reality shows. The scantily clad contestants prancing about in their swimwear are unlikely to introduce genuine perspective into your thinking. Dating shows do make people feel that their, perfectly normal and healthy, body shape is in need of a crash diet and weightlifting session. You don’t need to be super thin and magazine-cover ready to find love. We all know this, in theory. But there are plenty of people who still feel that they’ll be more successful once they’ve shifted those last few pounds, finished Invisalign or toned up their abs. This is nonsense and these thoughts must be rejected every time they creep in.

Getting on top of intrusive thoughts is something people talk about all the time. But it’s scientifically proven that the more you try to supress a thought, the more you focus on it. Google Wegner's white bear if you want to check the receipts. I use a different framework for stopping unhelpful beliefs from settling in; taking those thoughts captive and make them obedient to Christ. This may sound like an airy-fairy, spiritual message but it’s straightforward and practical. If a thought comes to my mind that I know is damaging, rather than letting it fester or attempting to fight it, I acknowledge it. I pray to God telling Him that I’m handing that thought over and I reject it from my life. It’s as simple as that.

Finally, kindness must be a priority in a way that these shows don’t demonstrate. “Being true to yourself” is all well and good, but it is often used as a blanket excuse for poor behaviour. We see this time and time again on Love Island – when a contestant justifies their wandering eye by saying they “have to do what’s right for them”. Sometimes – you don’t. Sometimes, you have to do what’s most considerate for the people around you. I’m sorry did I say sometimes – I meant all the time. That doesn’t mean staying in a relationship that isn’t right for you, but it means having an open and caring conversation with that person before your “head turns” or you’ve “pulled someone else for a chat”.

Maybe we should all watch reality dating shows from time to time. But when we’re taking our lessons on body-image, self-worth, relationships, and love from these shows, that’s when we’re going wrong. Personally, I prefer the Bible.

Molly Worthen on the charismatic leaders of America's cosmic drama

The plots and plotters that hold us spellbound

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Viewed from behind, Trump raises a fist.

Trump on the stump.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

What happens when Americans lose faith in their religious institutions—and politicians fill the void? In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Molly Worthen sweeping history helps us understand the forces that create leaders and hold their followers captive.

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. Worthen asks just how did we get here?

Worthen, a historian argues that we will understand the present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama that fulfils hopes and rectifies grievances—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way.

Author and historian Tom Holland loved this book.

“The great story of charisma in American history, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to MAGA, has never been more thrillingly told, never more learnedly explicated.”

In this extract, entitled Plotlines, Worthen introduces her four categories of charismatic leader: Prophets. Conquerors, Agitators, and Gurus.

Plotlines

Over the past several years, whenever I told friends or family that I was writing a book about charisma, they responded with a reasonable question. Which charismatic figures would I include? They peppered me with suggestions: What about Elvis Presley, or Dolly Parton? Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali? Surely I had to say something about Taylor Swift, right?

None of these fascinating people appears in this book. As you read it, you will probably think of a dozen others whom you wish I had included, and I’m sure you’ll have a point. I have mostly stuck to individuals who worked to build a movement in organized religion or politics, rather than musicians, artists, or athletes. Even within the spheres of religion and politics, I’ve been selective in order to craft a manageable story and bring into focus the patterns and transformations of charismatic leadership over the course of American history.

Sometimes this is an inspiring story, because charismatic leaders often turn up—and people decide to follow—out of a desperate response to alienation and injustice. People in anguish seek a savior. Yet charisma has no fixed moral standing. It can carve a path to freedom or to enslavement; it can lead people to embrace the rule of law or to sneer at it. Charisma causes problems for democracy as well as for authoritarian regimes. Without a sustained analysis of charisma over the long haul of American history since European settlement began, we are doomed to bumble along, blandly observing that ordinary people declare many allegiances that seem to contradict their own material interests and sabotage democracy—but never understanding why.

Over the past four centuries, five types of charismatic leaders have surged to dominance, each offering a variation on the great paradox, a different way for followers to hand over control while feeling liberated. I use these categories both to classify leaders and their movements, and to chart historical change: each type reacts to the type that came before, and responds to the pressures and anxieties of its own era. Like all typologies, this one maps imperfectly onto real people. Almost no one is a “pure” example of these categories, and some leaders are interesting precisely because they react against their age’s dominant type. But these categories have compelled even leaders who defied easy labels—that’s most of them—to respond to the ascendant charismatic style of their age.

The Prophets take us from the end of the Middle Ages into something beginning to resemble our own world. They drew on ancient patterns of contact with the divine to challenge authorities and captivate followers with the terror and ecstasy of God’s presence. They hewed close to tradition, operating in a time when Old World strictures still constrained life in the New World rather tightly. But some used those traditions to undermine reigning institutions, whether by violent rebellion or illicit gatherings—and so provoked a backlash. If the Prophets conceived of freedom in terms of divine salvation, they often harnessed mystical power for this-worldly ends. Usually this meant dismantling any structure that stood in God’s way.

The Prophets were, essentially, destroyers. In their wake they provoked an age of builders.

The Conquerors rose to prominence in the early nineteenth century—an age of mythology, mass media, and frontier enthusiasm in the European American imagination. They swung away from the age of the Prophets, who had so much to say about how powerless humans are.

Some of the Conquerors wielded military power, but all of them pursued what we might call metaphysical conquest. They fought to control spiritual forces. As the predestinarian Puritanism of earlier generations lost its appeal, more people placed an almost fundamentalist faith in the power of free will. It was tempting to think of spiritual forces—perhaps even the Holy Spirit— as a kind of technology, ready for manipulation. The stakes in these campaigns were high at a time when new advances in science impinged on everyday life. Waves of immigration made the country more religiously and ethnically diverse. Americans felt both freer and yet more confined than ever before.

The Agitators gained sway at the turn of the twentieth century, protesting modernity as a raw deal and democracy as tyranny in disguise. The Conquerors had, overall, expanded government authority over Americans’ lives and advanced a golden idea of progress. Now the pendulum swung back toward calls for destruction. The Agitators found a market for attacking the state and denouncing so-called progress as a lie. They defined themselves as outsiders whether they were or not, and discovered that gaining material power does not mean that one must stop telling a story of exile and affliction. This proved to be an important lesson in an age of world war and economic disaster: global crises have a way of transfiguring an outcast dissenter into a credible threat tot he standing order. Meanwhile, Christians grew wilder in their displays of New Testament charisma—because, paradoxically, it was easier to grapple with what Max Weber called the “iron cage” of modernity by embracing ever more outlandish signs of divine power.

The Experts were, on the face of things, the Agitators’ opposite in charismatic style. They were builders. In the wake of World War II, they capitalized on a backlash against the nightmare years of fascist demagogues, embraced the zenith of traditional institutions’ authority across Western culture and politics, and nurtured Americans’ faith in the power of technology and bureaucracy to solve large-scale problems.

They claimed the mantle of reason and procedure and did their best to relegate the political or religious clout of charisma to the distant past or primitive cultures.

But in fact, the three decades after World War II witnessed an explosion of religious revival in America—led by Christians who spoke in tongues, looked for the end times, and claimed to heal through the power of the Spirit. Even in the domain of credentialed and supposedly secular healing, the line between medicine and spirituality grew fuzzier. These years were the Experts’ apogee of cultural prestige, but Americans’ long- standing ambivalence about intellectual elites persisted. The most successful leaders capitalized on those mixed feelings. They nursed the tension between the Cold War celebration of science and freedom and, on the other hand, the lurking sense that technological leaps obscured eternal truths and needed the organizing power of a good story.

By the end of the twentieth century, as Americans lost faith in established media, churches, government, and nearly every other bulwark of modern society, the destructive strain of charismatic leadership re-surfaced in the form of the Gurus: preachers of self-actualization and get-enlightened-quick schemes, promoting God’s new temp job as personal assistant. Old-fashioned Pentecostal revival persisted too, but its leaders struggled to prevent the culture wars from capturing the Holy Spirit.

The Gurus looked, at first glance, like the Prophets and the Agitators. But in the generations since those earlier eras, it had become harder to pay obeisance to tradition—which was just fine, since the erosion of institutions had weakened traditions anyway, and opened a path for Gurus to achieve more influence than their destructive predecessors. Religious and philosophical tradition, in the hands of the Gurus, was no longer a firm guide but a palette for painting illusions of independence. Sometimes they used it to depict a new reality impervious to fact-checkers.

“Guru,” which means “remover of darkness” in Sanskrit, was originally a religious term. But in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the most prominent guru in the country was a businessman named Donald Trump. Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion. Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual. Like so many relationships between charismatic leaders and their followers, it stumped and angered those on the outside. Against the backdrop of the American charismatic tradition, however, his success makes perfect sense.

How, then, did early modern mystics and Puritan heretics who heard the voice of the Holy Spirit give way to devotees at a modern presidential rally, jostling toward the candidate iPhone-first, praying for a selfie? By the early twenty-first century, most religious institutions in the West had declined into husks of their former authority—at least by the usual measures. Today commentators turn more than ever to materialist explanations for political dysfunction, polarization, and the culture’s general crisis of confidence. They cite growing social inequality, impassable disagreements on policy, persistent racism and xenophobia, evil automated forces lurking on the internet. All true—yet all insufficient accounts. If we define the religious impulse as a hunger for transcendent meaning and a reflex to worship, then it is a human instinct only slightly less basic than the need for food and shelter, and Americans are no less religious than they have ever been. They will always find a way to satisfy these desires, even if charisma carries them down strange and costly paths.

Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Penguin Random House, 2025.