Love Island USA Is Trying to Gaslight Me
Rob The Snake Wrangler is not a good guy!
If you had told me the first full season of Love Island1 I would finally succumb to watching would be of Love Island USA — no accents, no “she’s a fit bird, mate,” no marmite toast (ok there was one instance of marmite toast) — I would have said quit muggin’ me off, luv. Or whatever. But maybe chalk it up to the Olympics, I’m apparently more patriotic2 than I ever could have imagined.
What really roped me into watching a bunch of bikini-clad hotties get it on (but not really) in Fiji was the promise of friendship and sisterhood. The defining quality of season 6 of Love Island USA seems to be the bonds formed among the girls in the Villa. The Powerpuff Girl trio of Leah, JaNa and Serena. The Australian Liv riding hard for all of her girls while giving the men in the Villa absolutely nothing (that emotional-support water bottle got more action than any man she coupled up with). By the end, the OG girls’ friendships felt so true to me that when those Casa Amor girls came in immediately mouthing “I love you” in the dressing room after two days of knowing each other, I scoffed, deeply offended by their cheap imitation of what the other girls have. You know nothing, nothing, of sisterhood until Serena is telling you not to be a bitter bitch and you’re taking that to heart because she’s right!
I could talk about the genuine representation of friendship and some actual expert-level conflict resolution displayed on this show for hours, but that is not actually why I am here. As much as I am grateful to live in the same timeline as JaNa pulling out a thick packet of receipts to support her besties in that otherwise lackluster New York City Reunion, there’s one thing I just can’t shake off about this season. One person, one pair of overalls that is haunting me to my core. I’m of course talking about Rob Rausch.
The python-wrangling Alabama-bred 6-foot-2(maybe3) Robert steal-yo-girl Rausch had me trembling in my boots from the moment he walked into the villa. That snake tattoo slithered right off his collarbone and around my neck. I was terrified of this man and the chokehold he was sure to have on these impressionable ladies, most of whom do not have fully formed frontal cortexes, might I add. Rob is bounds more attractive than most of the men in the villa. He has an old-Hollywood chiseled but unassuming jaw line and blue eyes that don’t make a fuss about themselves. They don’t pierce out of the socket like last-minute bombshell Harrison’s do, rather they feel like they could be your own personal discovery, a present to unwrap a drink or two into a shy but flirtatious conversation. And this becomes Rob’s defining characteristic. He is an onion, as the Islanders joke. The sometimes painfully-awkward Islander immediately offsets any assumptions we might make about him. He presents as a humble Alabama redneck and then tells us his favorite artist is Beabadoobee3. We’ve written him off as a fratty guys’ guy and then he will say something strangely insightful.
It’s clear from the jump that more than any of the other Islanders, Rob is playing the game. He has very few genuine connections (I’ll get to Leah in a minute) but manages to be in many couples and nearly makes it into the final four. He seems hyper aware of the Truman Show-esque experience he’s having, the edges of his cowboy smile often curling upwards in serious moments. Even when he is at the epicenter of the show’s juiciest drama, there’s something about him that seems unruffled, his displays of emotion calculated and theatrically hollow. It’s no wonder that after the show wrapped, there have been many conspiracy theories about Rob being a producer plant, or a performance artist, or having multiple different personalities, etc. etc.
All of this, in my opinion, is giving this man way too much credit. In fact, by the end of Love Island, it felt like everyone was giving Rob too much credit. He was the untouchable golden boy all the way up to the reunion. Producers went easy on him, editors cut the show to make it seem like he was a friend to all. The other men in the villa acted so egregiously that he looked sparkling in comparison. Rob wasn’t just playing the game of Love Island. He was very skillfully playing us. And I’m mad about it. I have not felt this gaslit by a television show since the Palladinos tried to convince me Midge Maisel was a good standup comedian.
Something about Rob unsettled me from the start, his affable yet dangerous handsomeness touched on some primordial wound that I had forgotten was there. He hadn’t done anything wrong at the offset, but I knew his type. He was the kind of Teflon man who will destroy you from the inside without leaving a trace of incriminating evidence. He’s tall and gorgeous enough to not need a personality, so any niche interests, surprising jokes or small notes of intelligence put him at a net advantage. And because of this advantage he emerges well-rounded and well-liked (by guys and certain kinds of women who live and die by male validation). Many mistake this for the traits of a good person.
Every instinct I had about Rob seemed to be affirmed by the first half of this season of Love Island USA. My hatred for him grew deeper and deeper, not because he couldn’t make up his mind about whether to stay in his still-early-days-but-well-matched coupling with Leah or to fold at every bombshell who throws herself at him (which was all of them), but because of the way he fortified these decisions with an insidious malignance. Rage was oozing out of me as I watched the way he weaponized his own emotions, breaking down and crying at the perfect moment: when Leah was calling him out for behaving terribly. Men aren’t allowed to have feelings, so he was actually being really brave by expressing himself… about how he is dumping one hot girl to date a different hot girl. I watched him say to his new beau and cool-girl (derogatory) Andrea and to as many men in the Villa who would listen, “I’m sitting here crying and she’s not even asking me what’s wrong. She’s not even asking me how I’m feeling,” making Leah seem like a heartless self-absorbed wench. Leah is an amazing target for this smear campaign because she is a little self-absorbed. But I was forever loyal to her after I watched this devil man work his magic against her. The reality is he was interrupting her as she was expressing her extremely valid feelings of confusion and disappointment after he, brazenly and without consideration of her feelings, prioritized a new connection and ditched her in the gutter. This was after he already left her single once and swooped back in telling her she was the only girl for him.
Leah’s feelings were obviously hurt, but she expressed them to Rob succinctly and without overt theatrics. In fact, the first time she brought up her qualms with his new flirtationship, she was so subtle, Rob could bulldoze right past her feelings and say “I knew you’d be cool about it. You’re a cool girl.” You see? You see how he rewards her lack of emotion when it suits him? And then transforms that same quality into iciness when he wants to play the victim? Not very demure! Very mindful, but in a bad way!
And then Rob got to play the ultimate victim when the girls decided to vote off Andrea, cutting his controversial yet steamy connection short. Just like his crying under the pool deck, Rob’s reaction to the vote seemed over-the-top, like he was playing into the drama, but always at someone else’s expense. He stood up and hugged Andrea from behind and indignantly said he would also be going home. Of course five minutes later after getting this poor girl’s hopes up, he decides it would be a disservice to himself to actually leave the Villa and bids Andrea a farewell that feels like when a “nice guy” is dumping you at a bar and somehow you find yourself apologizing to him?
At this point, it seemed like more people in the villa were starting to spot the bullshit. Leah, in the dressing room after the vote, mimics Rob’s absurd performance in what has now become one of the more famous lines of the show: “Now you’re sending THREE people home. And you’re still here in your overalls, bitch. Now what?”
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Perhaps clocking the fact that the girls in the villa are not on his side, Rob continues his mission of stirring the pot at Leah’s expense. And again, as much as my allegiance to her grows stronger with every “the DRAMAAA” she appropriately eye-rolls in Rob’s direction, Leah makes herself an easy target. Of course Leah had personal reasons for voting to send Andrea home. Rob’s crocodile tears over the implosion of their relationship happened mere days earlier. Who could blame the poor girl for wanting to punish him? But she masks her bitterness as well as she can and having now watched the full 12 minutes of deliberations thanks to the reunion, I can say confidently that while Leah might not have “taken a backseat” she wasn’t maliciously swaying the vote so she could get back with Rob. But she does make the mistake of trying to rekindle their friendship (OK maybe their romance as well) in Andrea’s absence.
As Leah begins pulling him for chats, the holier-than-thou snake wrangler sets out on a fact-finding mission. He enlists his bromantic other half Aaron’s actual other half Kaylor and her bestie Liv to get to the bottom of what really happened in the vote. But of course he frames he and Leah’s conversation in a way that makes it seem like Leah was throwing her fellow voters under the bus, which isn’t really what she was doing. This sets off a chain of dramatic events in which Rob confronts Leah for being a liar, Leah confronts Liv for saying she was a liar and Liv confronts Leah being confronted by Rob, and Serena jumps into action because “what we’re not going to do is gang up on my girl Leah.” And that’s MISS Love Island USA 2024 Winner to you, Robert. The point is that no one is talking about Rob’s spineless decision to stay in Fiji after pledging his allegiance to Andrea anymore. Rob lit a match under the two most fiery girls in the villa and walked away.
Rob keeps a much lower profile for the rest of the season, bouncing from bombshell to bombshell and only causing problems when standing up and frequently bending the truth for his problematic bestie Aaron. But even on this front, Rob toes the line rather expertly. He stays a close friend and confidant to Aaron, an alliance which likely kept him in the Villa for as long as he could have possibly stayed, but also makes sure to distance himself from Aaron’s actions so they don’t reflect poorly on him. In fact, all of the guys’ appalling behavior, especially in casa, only serve to make Rob look better by comparison. So much so that I started to question my hatred for him as the season came to a close.
The Islanders, later in the season, have a “movie night” in which the producers roll back the tapes to reveal hookups, makeup-room rants and side chats, anything to stir the pot and challenge the Islanders’ relationships. One of the clips shown was Leah ranting about Rob shortly after he had his little mental breakdown. She said when she saw him crying it gave her the ICK and called him a drama queen. I loved this rant. I remember cheering her on and finding absolutely nothing wrong with what she said. In fact, this cemented my love for Leah. I felt kinship with her as someone who could see straight through Rob and his imaginary onion of layers. But watching the clip back, outside of the heat of the moment, it didn’t look good on my girl. She looked petty and insensitive to her partner’s feelings. I could tell Leah felt the same way, because she gave Rob as sincere an apology as any. And Rob, forever the bigger man, accepted it.
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The entire ordeal had me reeling. Had I made Rob’s nefariousness up? Had I attributed malice where there was none? Did my disdain for Rob have much less to do with him and more to do with my own insecurity? It is true that Rob reminds me of men I’ve encountered in life who have rubbed me the wrong way, who have perhaps dated my friends and made no effort to be kind to me, or who have looked me over and decided I’m not someone they want to have sex with and so therefore not someone they have to treat like a human being. Mostly, Rob reminds me of the type of guy who could get away with anything with a soft smile and a self-deprecating sense of humor. He floats above it all and nothing touches him. But maybe that’s not his fault. Maybe I’m just jealous.
I also have to remind myself that this is a real person, not a character on a TV show. And I don’t really know him at all. I usually avoid reality TV because it’s too difficult for me to wrap my head around the idea that these are people’s real lives. As much as producers and editors manipulate scenes and situations, at the end of the day, these are real people representing themselves on camera and they have to then walk in the real world facing the consequences of however they’ve been perceived. It’s common knowledge that Love Island is a form of psychological torture for its contestants. Many Islanders have been scarred irreparably from their experience in the Villa. And I can see why. If I was forced to stay in a Mojo Dojo Casa House4 compound with a group of strangers, at least one of whom I am expected to share a bed with, and I was given no forms of outside communication, allowed absolutely no alone time, forced to eat avocado toast in a bikini every single morning and on top of that have to field drama5 left and right of bombshells coming in to steal my man who I really didn’t even like that much in the first place and THEN I had to go back to the outside world to find that millions have been watching and forming opinions on my every movement… the havoc I would wreak on myself and the world around me would be immeasurable. There’s not enough Thorazine in the Western Hemisphere. In comparison, all of these people fared shockingly well. Send them into battle, honestly. Get those girls in the Marines. After enduring all those nonsensical challenges, after enduring movie night, I trust them to fight for my freedom. (I’m kidding guys, I hate war!)
So I can’t fault Rob entirely for perhaps putting on a performance in the Villa. Maybe he was just protecting his peace. Maybe, as many have theorized, the Rob we saw in Fiji is just a character he was playing to have fun with the show and then move on, unscathed.
But that’s the point. I have sympathy for the Islanders who face consequences after their time in the Villa. Rob faces none. I think back to that movie night. I think about the fact that there wasn’t a single video played that depicted Rob in a bad light. I think about how little he had to answer for in the reunion. And how he did the classic “Can I finish talking, please?” to Liv when she tried to confront him about how he handled the Leah situation. I think about the fact that someone like Andrea is getting a barrage of internet hate and he has retained the same unruffled exterior he had in the beginning. This man never had to sit in the hot seat, and that’s emblematic of how well his covert narcissism allowed him to play the game, but also a society of fellow bros, TV producers, interviewers, unsuspecting bombshells and even viewers like me that smooth the pavement for someone like Rob. Teflon guys don’t stay dry on their own, the world weaves for them those water resistant fibers. He might not have won Love Island, but it’s Rob’s world, and, unfortunately, we’re all living in it.
I want to formally apologize to Julia for watching this season first before the one she requested I watch… let’s work it out on the remix
Though that food challenge has put me off of the Fourth of July more than the Vietnam War did for ‘60s Berkeley co-eds.
I don’t believe any of the Rob conspiracy theories but I would believe that his stint on Love Island was just a long con to getting Beabadoobee to be his girlfriend.
Complete with enough neon sign verbiage to make AirBnB foam at the mouth.
Not to mention having to feign excitement for every “I GOT A TEXTTT” or anytime an Islander comes down the stairs in a sexy outfit (“can I get a little commotion for the dress” is no longer sitting right with me).