(ThySistas.com) Let me start with a confession before anyone comes for me. I watch. Every season, glass of something cold in hand, group chat lit up, my sister texting me theories at eleven at night about who is playing a game and who is genuinely soft for somebody. So this is not a woman standing outside the party throwing rocks. This is a woman who has been at the party a long time and has finally decided to say something out loud that a lot of us have been swallowing.
We have got to stop crowning strangers.
Somewhere around week two, the timeline shifts. It starts sweet. A cute clip, a slow dance by the pool, a boy who finally says the thing a girl has been waiting to hear. And then the caption appears under it, bold and certain, declaring these two beautiful strangers the blueprint. The standard. The thing the rest of us should apparently be aspiring toward. Marriage energy. Loyalty personified. Written in the stars, ordained, meant to be. All of that heaped onto two people who, seven days prior, could not have told you each other’s middle names or how their mothers take their tea.
That gap between what we are seeing and what we are declaring is where I want to sit for a minute.
Because surviving inside that house is not the same as building something that lasts, and I think we know that in the quiet part of our brains even while our thumbs are typing otherwise. The environment is engineered. There are no bills in there. No sick parent calling at dawn. Nobody has to figure out whose family they are spending the holidays with, or how to split the cost of a broken boiler, or what happens when one of them loses a job and gets low and mean for a season. There is no boredom. And boredom, plain domestic boredom, is where a lot of love either deepens or quietly dies. What the show gives us instead is a pressure cooker with good lighting, endless free time, and producers who benefit financially from tension. Enduring a few weeks of that tells us these two can flirt, can kiss well, can cry on cue when the moment calls for it. It tells us almost nothing about whether they can be kind to each other on a Tuesday with nothing interesting happening.
And yet the projection starts almost immediately. This one is fascinating to me, and a little troubling. We take people who are, at best, in the very first flush of infatuation, and we drape our own longings over them like a coat. We write futures for them. We assign them a wedding. We defend them in arguments with total strangers online as though we know their hearts. What we are actually doing is looking at a screen and seeing the thing we want for ourselves, then confusing the wanting with the having. A woman aches for devotion, so she watches a boy carry a girl’s plate and declares him husband material, when carrying a plate under camera is possibly the lowest bar a man has ever stepped over. We are so hungry to see it work that we mistake the appetizer for the whole meal.
I want to be careful here, because this lands differently for us specifically, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Black women have been sold a particular kind of scarcity story about love for a long time. Too educated. Too independent. Too much. The whisper that says the good ones are taken and you waited too long. So when a dark skinned girl finally gets chosen on national television, when she is centered and adored and fought over instead of overlooked, something in a lot of us exhales. We want it so badly for her because we recognize the ache. And that is beautiful, that solidarity, that wanting good for our own. I would never mock it. But the danger sits right beside the beauty. When we are that starved to see ourselves loved well, we lower the standard for what loving well even looks like. We start calling the bare minimum a masterpiece. We hold up a six week situationship as proof that fairytales exist for us too, and then quietly measure our own decades long marriages, our own patient and unglamorous partnerships, against a fantasy that has not survived a single real winter.
That comparison is the part that keeps me up at night, if I am being fully honest with you.
Because the sister watching at home is not just watching. She is calculating. She is looking at that couple, then looking at her own man who has been showing up steadily and imperfectly for eleven years, who does not do grand villa gestures because he is tired from work and picking up the children, and some small ugly voice tells her she settled. That the screen has the real thing and her kitchen has the compromise. It is exactly backwards. Her kitchen holds the truth of it. Her kitchen has the test the villa never had to take. But the fantasy is loud and the ordinary is quiet, and loud usually wins the argument if we let it.
Here is what nobody wants to hear at the reunion. A large number of these televised romances do not make it. They barely make it out of the airport. Some are performing for the prize money and everyone involved knows it. Some are two lovely kids who genuinely liked each other under those specific conditions and then discovered, in the cold air of actual life, that liking someone by a pool is a completely different thing from liking them across a lease.
The ones who beat the odds do exist, and I want to name them, because giving them their credit is part of my whole point. Serena and Kordell won back in 2024 and are still going, even after a Casa Amor storm and that dockside blowup half of us thought was the end of them. Leah and Miguel took the long messy route and came out the other side dating for real. Nic and Olandria, who spent most of their season swearing up and down they were only friends, are somehow the pair who stuck. Marco and Hannah from a few summers back got engaged and set an actual wedding date. Taylor and Bergie are engaged now too. I am genuinely happy for every one of them. But look closely at what gave each pairing a real chance. Not the show. The months and years after it. They lasted because once the cameras packed up, those two went and did the boring holy work. The arguments nobody applauded. The hard conversations. The slow learning of each other’s wounds. None of that happened on the island. All of it happened later, in private, where no caption could reach.
So what am I actually asking. I am asking us to enjoy the show as the show. Laugh at it. Gossip about it. Root for the girl who reminds you of your niece. Absolutely. But hold the crown. Let people earn the word before we hand it to them. Two attractive people surviving a controlled experiment is entertainment. It is not a blueprint, and it is a little dangerous to treat it as scripture for how our own hearts should be graded.
Real devotion is not photogenic. It does not trend. It looks like somebody sitting with you in a hospital waiting room saying nothing useful, just staying. It looks like fifteen years of somebody choosing you again on a morning when you are not remotely lovable. It looks like forgiveness you did not deserve and repair that took months. That is the standard, and it never once needed a villa, a producer, or a nation of viewers deciding whether it was allowed to count.
So the next time a clip comes across your feed and your thumb starts drifting toward that word, pause. Ask yourself what you actually know about these two people. Ask what they have survived together beyond a swimming pool and a screaming challenge. And then, gently, save that word. Somebody in your real life has earned it far more than the strangers on your screen, and she has probably been waiting years for you to notice.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.