Sleeping with Love Island

Old lady tries to understand relationships and can't.

I cannot sleep lately. It’s a strange liminal state to be in, not quite awake but definitely not asleep, where somehow I have to go through my day as if I were okay. I’m trying things. Melatonin, listening to boring podcasts, turning off the hamster wheel in my head, lying diagonally across the bed, petting my dog, sleeping on my back and having cereal at 3 am. Watching Love Island. I don’t mean to but I am not rid of all of my bad habits yet.

Anyway, in the past, I’d probably try other things that involve people. I mean murder. I don’t mean murder, you know what I mean. I think about how for granted I took things in the past – sleep, people, murder. I mean sleep and people.

It seems to me, however, that at my age (89), most of my life is about Protecting My Peace, which is what they say on Instagram — women my age and older, who like themselves and who just care less about impressing everyone. The non-single me would have considered this a defensive statement, I’d probably say it’s just something you tell yourself to feel better about yourself, Brenda, but now that I’m here, I buy it 100 percent.

I’m old enough to know that getting too close with people is what affects peace, and although I hate boiling things down to What’s In It For Me, I do often look at all relationships through that lens. If I’m going to invest in someone — and everything they bring with them, good and bad — will it actually improve my life? Or will I end up compromising myself and spending pointless hours fixing things that didn’t need fixing when I was alone?

Back to Love Island, though. I’m always baffled at how, within a couple of days (sometimes hours), people who say they’re “matched” start spiraling. They hit it off — oiled young bodies sliding against each other, chatting about “connections,” flipping hair, flexing nipples, sipping frothy pineapple drinks — and then, BAM, someone flips out. How?

I’ve decided it’s intimacy, or the illusion of it, that turns people into demanding, expecting beasts. Nobody has to work for anything. You can re-couple five minutes later-- on TV or on Bumble. Next!

People behave like they’re owed something just because they’ve made it through three decent dates without committing murder. (Still stuck on murder, sorry.) The bar is so low, there is no bar. And everyone wants credit for “showing up,” as if that’s not just the bare minimum for functioning in society.

Reality TV makes it obvious. By Day Three someone is weeping in a confessional because it was “too much.” Too much what? Hydration? Eye contact? It’s the illusion of closeness that triggers the madness, and it’s the illusion we crave. Then we punish each other for not sustaining it.

This could be a lack of sleep but maybe it’s all relevant. The same machinery that powers all of that -- the hope, the expectation, the inevitable disgust -- is exactly what makes people hard to be around. That’s why peace needs protecting and not from chaos but from proximity of people mistaking you for a solution. Goodnight now.