Love and Narcissism in Reality Television

Love Island is a reality television series structured as a dating game, where participants compete to form romantic relationships. This article puts the show in conversation with theories and philosophies of love to draw between them an idea of love as a singular moral event that is constrained by cultural imperatives. What emerges is an existential phenomenology of love in three parts: first, romantic love is framed as an opening on to moral life; then, it is argued that moral life is enacted through a love for the neighbour that constitutes and animates our being in the world; and finally, it is shown that narcissism is not straightforwardly a negative condition but a balancing force in moral life. The article concludes with reflections on what this conceptual work might offer to analyses of relationships played out on reality television.