None of my friends believe me when I say I was offered my first job at a tabloid newspaper because of my impeccable Love Island knowledge.

In 2019, I could, on demand, name every cast member, coupling and winner from every previous season – and my reality TV stan status spanned further than Mallorca. A few years ago, another of my proudest achievements was bingeing 240 episodes, each 45 minutes long, of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills over the Christmas break, and I’ve also been known to catch up on two weeks’ worth of Married At First Sight (MAFS) overnight, in order to join the debrief with my coworkers post-holiday.

The pull? I enjoyed looking through the peephole, discovering how real-ish people lived. My free evenings were spent devouring every episode and reunion I could; every commute spent keeping tabs on the faceless debates around cast and plot lines on X.

But there’s been a shift in how I view these fly-on-the-wall shows — from an acceptable form of voyeurism… to something like emotional violence.

Let’s take Jack Dunkley, my personal villain of series 11 of MAFS Australia — a 38-part series in which couples meet at the altar before spending eight weeks road-testing their relationship. While he, in a recent Instagram post, claimed he was the victim of ‘manipulation’ and ‘corruption’, I’m not sure you can force the phrase “muzzle your woman“ to fall out of someone’s mouth.

Previously, I may have labelled him a toxic person — even though I’m aware his presentation was carefully crafted by a team of producers whose purpose was to evoke emotion and entertain. However, what if his behaviour was actually a response to being triggered for weeks on end?

He himself admits to just that: “That was a man at breaking point,” said Jack, speaking on Australian radio in February 2024. “I broke, I snapped, I said some dumb sh*t. And that’s what you saw on TV. I was disgusted.”

Of course, his misogynistic comment wasn’t acceptable. I doubt (read: hope) it’s the kind of phrase he’d let slip day to day, but what I once deemed a form of fairly harmless entertainment (you know, aside from some light trolling and the pressures of being in the public eye), I now view as slow mental torture.

Volunteers, some of whom didn’t even want a fast route to fame but rather to meet the love of their life (Love is Blind UK) or to have the experience of a lifetime (Big Brother?), end up having their biggest insecurities and triggers tested again and again. And then again, once their season airs.

Forgive the airing of my own emotional baggage, but case in point: a fairly common, but unfounded fear of mine is my partner leaving me for something ‘better’. Stick me in an apartment block with eight other women, all of whom I might deem to be sexier and/or more accomplished than I, and then ask my partner to rank them in order of attractiveness? Yeah, that might prompt an irrational response I’m not super proud of.