Summer Loving
What Love Island and the Ballers Have to Teach Us About Romance
by Kaya Oakes
Every few years, the Enneagram personality test makes the rounds on social media. The test sorts us into one of nine different archetypes and promises to lead to greater self-understanding. Californians have a fervor for both navel gazing and pseudoscience that runs as deep as the Hayward Fault. Naturally, I took the Enneagram test immediately upon discovering it. Not only am I a fourth generation Oakland kid and a Californian to the core, I’m an academic and a writer. In other words, a nerd. My expectation was that I’d be a type 1 or 3 on the Enneagram, a perfectionist or an overachiever.
Instead, the test told me I’m an Enneagram 4: a romantic. This sounded ridiculous, so I took it again, and yet again, romantic. For a while I wrestled with this notion and then realized that when summer rolls around, two things become the obsessive center of my attention: the Oakland Ballers and the reality TV show Love Island. And both of those things are deeply romantic: exciting, impractical, the subject of obsession and fantasy in the minds of fans.
If you’re reading this, you already know about the Oakland Ballers. And you probably know that a certain movie about that other baseball team that used to play here had that memorable line of dialogue, “how can you not be romantic about baseball?” Baseball is deeply romantic in the sense that it fuses nostalgia and longing, that its seasons are somehow ephemeral and also eternal. Baseball, too, is a sport for losers. Even the best players drop balls, swing and miss, and crash into the outfield fence only to be left staring into an empty glove. Even the best teams set historical records and can still lose game after game.
Love Island also sorts people into winners and losers. It’s a reality show where a variety of extremely attractive people are sent to spend the summer in a villa somewhere tropical. They are there to ostensibly find love and the individual contestants have to stay “coupled up” with another Islander to survive the weekly eliminations. There are competitions involving sloppy kissing and lots of whispered scheming about stealing someone’s partner away in between sincere conversations about emotions. Winning couples are chosen by the public. The show started in the UK 2015 and now exists in ten different countries from Albania to Sweden, kind of like the World Cup, but with more visible abs.
Like baseball, Love Island is confined to the summer season, and like baseball, it even has a weekly recap show (Aftersun) where various pseudo-celebrities and recently ejected Islanders chat about strategies for winning. The comedian Ian Sterling narrates the show in a stream of clever and snarky jokes, a combination of announcer and mascot. The “coach” is the show’s host Ariana Madix, who floats in once in a while in perilously high heels to advise the contestants. Americans are obsessed. As a sign of its cultural dominance, this year, Love Island USA appeared on betting markets like Polymarket and Kalshi for the first time, and last year, the New York Knicks’ Jalen Brunson went viral for a tweet about the show. The secret was out: Love Island isn’t just a dating show. It’s also a competitive sport.
When we root for couples on Love Island, just as we do with baseball teams, we root for the underdogs. This year, when Aniya chose KC over pure-hearted Carl, millions of people groaned in frustration. Carl was the underdog, a “Casa Boy” brought in midseason to try and tempt people away from their original couples. Unlike selfish KC, Carl was kind and considerate. Thankfully, after Carl was booted, America voted to bring him back, and he and Aniya recoupled and finished in second place. The first place winners, Trinity and Bryce, were sweet and authentic, but they had to overcome an age gap and Trinity’s anxieties about interracial dating. TikTok and Instagram were clogged with edits of them staring longingly at one another and giggling. It was all very romantic.
So, too, was last season with the Ballers. The playoffs were a baseball fan’s dream come true. The comeback! The underdog team from an underdog city taking home the trophy! When Raimondi exploded with joy my husband looked over and said, “we really needed this.” That “we” meant the two of us, but it also meant everyone who’d become emotionally invested in this team. All of the fans had held our breath through tough losses and fantasized about what would happen if the Ballers turned it around. And then they did, and people around us were actually sobbing and screaming and the Oakland firetruck turned on its hoses and the players sprinted toward the rainshower, and, damnit, that was romantic too.
Every season of Love Island has its ups and downs. Some seasons are near perfection. Love Island USA season 6 brought us a friends-to-lovers romance between Serena and Kordell that was straight out of Pride and Prejudice, but with twerking. Love Island UK season 5 winner Amber had to overcome being rudely dumped by a dim-witted gym bro before dashing Irish rugby player Greg arrived to win her broken heart. But last year’s season of Love Island USA was a disappointment, full of endless petty bickering, and in spite of the happy ending, this season had more than its share of Manosphere-style behavior on the part of the guys. And sadly but also predictably, most of these couples break up as soon as they leave the island. It’s all ephemeral, a fever dream of romance.
So it is with baseball. This year, the Ballers have sometimes struggled. Favorite players have moved on, new teams have arrived and brought new threats, some games have been painful to sit through. Other nights, the balls go over the fence, returning and new players both delight us, walk offs bring players across home plate, and we get to sing Celebration while carrying our trash out on the way to our cars. We root for Oakland as a city in spite of its flaws, because Oakland, too, can be romantic. With the lake and the gorgeous sunsets as backdrops, amazing music and art outflow from Oaklanders’ deep feelings of affection for the place where we live. So we root for the Ballers even when they lose, because like every day in Oakland, each game has at least a few moments of transcendence and awe.
At the end of the semester, I introduce my students to the Japanese phrase mono no aware. Loosely translated, it means an awareness of the ephemerality of life, of the impermanence of things, but there is a sweetness to that feeling too. Whether it’s a championship season or a summer fling, the experience might not last, but memories do, and you never know what will happen next. Carl actually talked about mono no aware to describe his experience on Love Island this season, which led me to sigh “oh Carl!” at my TV. He’s a romantic, Love Island fans are romantics, and people who love baseball are romantics. Romance offers us an escape and hope for the future, even if it’s fleeting. And you don’t need a personality test to tell you that’s something we all need.
Kaya Oakes is a senior lecturer in writing at UC Berkeley and the author of six books of nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and many other publications. She was born and raised in North Oakland and lives a few blocks from Bushrod Park, home field of Oakland baseball legends. Put on Mac Dre’s “Feeling Myself” if you want to see her dance like a fool.
