Everything you wanted to know about 'Love Island' but were afraid to ask

In 2021, I did not run a marathon. I didn't read the novels of Dostoyevsky. I didn't even organize my sock drawer.

I did, however, watch an entire season of "Love Island," the dating show that airs six nights a week for eight weeks throughout the summer in the United Kingdom, where it has become a warm-weather institution as beloved as a Pimm's cup.

Yes, that's right, I spent 50 or so hours — more than an entire work week! — watching young women in wildly impractical swimwear chatting up heavily tattooed men with questionable hairdos. I had so many questions as I watched, many of which had to do with the practical implications of wearing tiny thongs for 12 hours a day in intense humidity. Do "Love Island" producers have bikini waxers on call? Or gynecologists?

I do not regret a single moment of it.

The series, which debuted in its current format in 2015, is one of the most watched shows in the U.K. It unspools in nightly installments, like an old-fashioned radio serial, albeit one in which people have furtive sex under Ikea duvets.

Its premise is fairly simple: Five single men and five single women are brought to a Spanish villa and immediately paired with a member of the opposite sex.

Over the course of the summer, dozens of new islanders are brought in and the contestants recouple at their discretion. Anyone not in a couple is in danger of elimination. At the end of eight weeks, the public votes on their favorite