What Love Island Can Teach Us About the Importance of the Word 'Like'

Time​ Magazine

6 hours ago

For connoisseurs of dating reality TV, the arrival of warm weather means one thing: Love Island, by far one of Britain's most significant cultural imports, is back. (There are offshoots, including Australia and the United States, but the UK version remains the blueprint.) The premise is simple: a group of attractive, tanned young people flock to a 'villa' somewhere very warm (usually Spain or South Africa) and attempt to couple up for love—and money and social media fame. At its heart, the show is a game, with the fate of each couple inevitably falling into the hands of the public, who make the final call on which couples make it to the end. Committing to an entire season requires stamina and dedication for both viewers and participants. But should you embark on this journey, your perseverance will be greatly rewarded.
Admittedly, one of the deeper pleasures of the show is that it is quite often a little bit boring. But if you stay the course and watch each episode, what unfurls is a remarkable record of how people try (and fail) to make connections, almost in real time. These connections are extremely important because money and fame (and yes, sometimes love) are on the line, and are also formed on a very tight timeline. This means that the couples are either extremely sure of their love or not really sure at all. And because these moppets are horny, prone to drama, and above all, young, a word they say so much, all the time, is 'like.'
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Nothing about this is particularly surprising. 'Like' is a word that is largely associated with the youth and a word that many people write off as useless—a verbal gristle meant to be trimmed from the meat of your speech, in service of hewing to an outdated standard of what sounds 'right.' It's silly, really—being concerned with something as trivial as this when there are far more pressing horrors in the world. Perhaps it's also a tremendous waste of time. But paying close attention to when we hear 'like' is a useful exercise. Listen and you'll reach a thrilling conclusion: 'like' is a valuable tool that we all have (and should be using) to make and maintain connection.
'Like' is often deployed to ease the burden of communication and to give a little grace to yourself to figure out what you're really trying to say. In emotionally charged situations where matters of the heart are concerned, 'like' gives you the space to collect your thoughts. This is a minute calculation that's so small as to feel imperceptible and likely happens without much thought at all.
If you watch Love Island with the captions on, this point becomes remarkably clear—each 'like' that peppers a side chat between two people is there to bolster teensy attempts at vulnerability. Consider the aftermath of a devastating recoupling, where some already-established couples are ripped from each other's sides and paired with someone new. After the tears dry, the new lovebirds are faced with the onerous task of getting to know each other. And these conversations come in fits and starts, and the space between thoughts is usually linked with 'like.' It's a word that literally buys you time—just a second or two— in a way that's much more pleasing than the alternative, dead air. 'Like' shows that you care in a way that silence could never. You're giving yourself a minute to collect your thoughts while alerting the other person that you're doing so, all without saying very much at all. You're also giving the other person the grace to do the same.
There's a gendered reason why we don't like to say this word. The old chestnut about 'like' is that it's the Valley girls' fault that we say it in the first place, which has negative connotations because they're thought to be 'dumb teenage girls.' But this is an antiquated line of thought. Teenage girls and women are actually linguistic innovators and have influenced the way most people have spoken for generations. Millennials who were old enough to see Clueless in theaters are now gracefully sliding into middle age. They have climbed the corporate ladder enough to have achieved nominal positions of power. They grew up slinging 'like' around, so one assumes it is part of their speech, both at home and in the workplace. If your boss says, 'Can you send me that thing I asked about like, sometime next week?' and nothing sounds amiss, that's worth noting. 'Like' isn't improper or unprofessional; it's just a manner of speaking that sounds a little different than the past.
What naysayers of 'like' are truly upset about, on some level, is women, and specifically, that the way they naturally speak is inferior and should be treated as such. We know that this is not the case. But women's speech has traditionally been coded as weak and men's as strong, as linguistics professor Robin Lakoff noted in her landmark book Language and Women's Place. The inference here is that women's speech is coded as weak and men's, the direct opposite.
But if we start to think about the word as an asset rather than a liability, then its potential really starts to show. When we revisit the lovelorn singles of Love Island's villa, we can see quite clearly that both the men and the women dabble in 'soft' language about their feelings, not only with members of the opposite sex, but with each other, too. And yes, Love Island is purportedly a show about love, but it is really about all types of connection—of love, sure, but what they really end up with is friendship. And 'like' allows them to forge the connections that lead to it, one chat at a time.
It's a lesson that we could all learn, in ways large and small—that the English language's flexibility is so intrinsically intertwined with how we connect. In fact, if we all stop fearing 'like,' we might be surprised at what happens.