Dani Dyer and Jack Fincham, Love Island 2018’s winners, spent the last week of their relationship in a place we never quite expected them to reach: the realm of an incredibly public are-they-aren’t-they-together reality TV show couple. Last week, Dani announced the pair had split but were still friends, then they were photographed out together and spotted commenting kind things on each others’ Instagram posts, as if they’d never broken up. And now Dani has posted to Instagram an explainer of sorts.
Under a photo of her and Jack, she added a caption with the intention of putting ‘all comments to bed’. The thrust of this was that she’s just young, ‘trying to get my shit together and grow into a woman’. Being watched by millions of fans, no matter how well-intentioned, has got to her, ‘but arguments are arguments and I love him.’
Dani is very clear that you can ‘only please people that want to be pleased’ and sure, just because their relationship is so public, doesn't mean the public has any right over it.
However, it’s no wonder that fans feel an entitlement to Jack and Dani and their relationship. The young loves may have picked each other in Love Island 2018's opening episode, but it was the fans who voted to keep them in, week in, week out, and it was the fans who helped the pair win the £50,000 prize money and all the validation that comes with winning Love Island. No wonder the fans feel entitled - even if Dani and Jack never asked for this level of attention, the whole set-up of the show asks for it!
Unlike so many reality star couples of yore - Katie Price and Peter Andre, Millie Mackintosh and Hugo Taylor and Charlotte Crosby and Gaz Beadle - or even some of the couples around them in the show - Adam Collard and Zara McDermott, for instance - Jack and Dani bucked a bunch of stereotypes. Both of them are living, breathing proof that the slick people on Love Island aren't what they seem. Dani, beautiful but not a glossy bombshell, was gobby, yet encouraging of her female friends, just as loyal to Samira and Laura as she was to Jack. And Jack wasn’t a buffed, pea-cocking poser, preferring to spend early mornings bird-watching than pumping iron. Their love was just so loveable because it was so utterly relatable, something so many of us could see a bit of ourselves in.
However, when Dani posted her carefully-worded message of ‘Jack and I have sadly decided to part ways. It's been an incredible six months, and we will always have a place in our hearts for each other, but we've sadly come to the realisation that it's not meant to be long term. We both plan to stay friends. I hope you'll all understand. Love Dani x.’ they had entered the are-they-aren’t-they stage of post-reality TV relationships.
At this stage of the relationship, so many reality TV stars are happy to enter the mudbath and languish there for years, like it's a spa retreat. They willfully argue with each other and slag each other off and wind each other up and drop hints and flaunt ring-less fingers and go out and get pissed and flirt with other people, inviting paparazzi to document it all, or, more recently, posting it all on Insta. Not because they're genuinely grieving, but because the whole thing's been an act, and because conflict = clout = engagement = money for the Insta-famous, the set-piece of a tussle is great news, and big money, for each of them. They use their emotions to play our emotions to make money, playing out a real-life soap opera that makes them pretty indistinguishable from a department store's Christmas advert, in the emotional manipulation stakes.
Meanwhile, fans are left confused, bored and utterly done with the silly, cynical ups and downs. The constant are-they-aren't-they is so clearly the last ditch effort from pair of ailing celebrities, with little talent to give beyond their famous-for-being-famous credentials, to have a little more time before their star combusts.
This isn’t a place for normal couples to be, and what the fans like to think is that Jack and Dani are a normal couple, who just happened to have met via the means of the most popular dating show in the UK and far beyond. Regardless of whatever argument they had behind closed doors, we're not ready for them to peddle such bullshit. On top of that, they’re way too talented to have this sort of publicity swirling around them, aren’t they? They’re TV show presenters in the making, who should set their sights a little higher than the tawdry world of online breakups. Luckily, Dani has risen above it, with her perfectly relatable 'I'm young, I messed up, life is weird' sort of message and him basically saying absolutely nothing publicly about their tiff.
This isn’t just because we want them to stay together forever in a neat little encapsulation of whatever we, the fans, selfishly and subjectively, think love should be. Of course a couple many of us have never met are entitled to break up whenever they like and however they like. But wouldn’t it be so much more appealing for the fans, the many, many fans, who already feel like they own a bit of Jack and Dani, if they handled their love differently to all the reality stars who’d come before them? If they steered clear of the murky territory of prolonged, nasty break-ups which bear no relation to actual real life? That sounds great on paper, doesn't it?