Love Island USA Recap: Situationships

Love Island
Episode 31
Season 8 Episode 31
Editor’s Rating ★★
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Each season of Love Island USA contains approximately 1 million episodes, and we are recapping all of them. Check back for morning-after recaps of weekday episodes and a Monday roundup of the weekend’s shenanigans. 

We are now at the point in the show where it is in everyone’s best interest to be as in love as possible, as the American public wants to vote for a couple it truly believes in, which is why we find all of our Islanders in various stages of locking it down. Trinity and Bryce, who are lapping everyone else in the commitment department, have nothing left to do now but to stare into each other’s eyes and talk about how much they like being together. Bryce, in particular, excels at this. He just wants to be next to her. He just wants to spend all his time with her. That day after Casa was the purest joy he’s ever felt. Trinity, for her part, is no less eloquent when she tells her friends, “He’s weird as fuck and awkward as hell, but I like it.” 

Carl and Aniya continue on their slow but steady progress toward a real relationship as Carl asks, “Nantucket is close to Georgia, right?” Whatever, they’ll figure out the distance thing later. The point is, Aniya is willing to go to both Nantucket and Denver, so things are coming along nicely. Even Dylan decides that 998 apologies from Kenzie is the charm and claims that they are now back on track. Then again, we’ve heard him say this before, and he hasn’t gotten to talk to his mom yet, so who knows. Meanwhile, the three other couples have been taking more concrete steps to solidify their relationships both to each other and to appease the public. 

Unfortunately, the boys do tend to give away the game by their reactions when they wake up sans girls, who have snuck out of the villa first thing in the morning for a girls’ day at the water park. KC and Zach find a morning without women refreshing. The sky seems bluer, the air seems crisper. Bryce reflects that it’s been nice to cook for someone in the morning. Sincere, who wakes up alone in the hideaway, is simply confused. 

Melanie and Sincere get the hideaway.

By rights, I think Trinity and Bryce really deserved the hideaway, as they’re still the only ones who are “together” in the outside world sense of the word. But maybe they figure they’re so far ahead at this point that they can afford to give Melanie and Sincere a shot at the title. What exactly happens in there between Melanie and Sincere remains a question for debate. Sincere says, respectfully, they did nothing. Melanie tells the girls that there might have been a little French fry action. The night-vision camera implies a bit more than that, but I think we can leave it there, to be honest. 

With no more bombshells coming in to test their connection, and with the full-throated support of Melanie’s best villa friend Aniya (not Kenzie), there is nothing that can stop these two now, much as one might wish that there were. You might think that Melanie’s loved ones could knock some sense into her when they visit on Family Day, but she tells Sincere she actually thinks her mom wouldn’t be mad at Sincere at all. At this point, all I can hope for is that Melanie is just sticking out this relationship to the end of the season, at which point she can dump Sincere for good at the airport on the way home. But who am I kidding? 

Are Kayda and Zach in a situationship?

I have never related to Trinity more than when Kayda eagerly informs her that she and Zach are now “exclusive” and Trinity, voice equally upbeat, asks, “What does that mean!” Kayda explains that it is the stage between “talking” and “dating,” as if this were a normal part of a relationship progression that has always been there and certainly wasn’t just invented by Zach. “So it’s a situationship,” says Trinity. 

Neither Trinity, Aniya, nor Melanie, nor Bryce, for that matter, fully understands what “exclusive” means if it is not just “dating.” (“Arrogant,” sniffs Zach.) This is a little rich coming from Melanie, but Mela is a do-as-I-say kind of friend anyway. Kenzie has a more generous read on the situation, no pun intended. She interprets this to mean that Zach and Kayda intend to keep dating, as in seeing each other outside of the villa, without dating, as in being boyfriend-girlfriend. I had always assumed that continuing to date outside the villa was a given for all the final couples unless they pull a Huda and break up in the middle of their final date. It’s possible we’re all actually talking about the same thing, and Kayda is getting the short shrift, however you define it. This is why labels are important, people!

Either way, it suddenly makes Zach and Kayda seem a lot less secure than they did before Zach asked Kayda to be his exclusive, transatlantic non-girlfriend. Which would be the opposite effect he intended. 

KC and Titi are in a relationship.

KC getting the boys to help him set up an elaborate promposal-style scavenger hunt to formally ask Titi to be his girlfriend should have been a purely wholesome moment that shoots them straight to the top of the compatibility leaderboard. Which is why I’m actually pissed at KC for ruining it with his own observations. In his beach-hut confessional, where KC is supposed to be waxing poetic about his affection for Titi, KC says, “I think she has nothing left to prove.” Prove? Prove to whom? Later, even more irritatingly, he says, “Titi has literally shown me that she’s worthy to be my girl.” Excuse me, sir. Worthy to be your girl? Are you for real? This seems like an obvious point, but what have you done to show that you are worthy of her? The answer, I guess, is that he has hidden photo-booth pictures of himself all around the villa and recruited the boys to help lead Titi to each successive clue, ending when Zach leads her to the still-empty dock and scampers away. Then, of course, KC arrives, roses in hand, and asks Titi if she will be his girlfriend. This becomes the second time Titi cries tears of joy over KC, so I have to let her have this moment. She tells the beach hut that she loves him, which is wild, but good for her, I guess.

At the very least, she knows exactly where she stands with KC right now, which is more than Kayda can say.