Here’s What Every Love Island Contestant Is Going to Do Now

Love Island is over, and with it so too are my hopes and dreams. I feel hollow and bereft now. There is a void that used to have 32 people in it, and now is empty and redundant. Kem, Amber, Chris. Olivia, Montana, Camilla. My heroes, my mates. Less so Chloe, or Simon. Or Steve. There was someone on it called Steve. Or Marino, if you remember Marino. Tyne-Lexy was one of them. Harley. Isn't it surreal that something you can watch so closely can have details – and by "details", I mean "entire human beings, called Harley" – that you can miss, that you can forget? This is like the Mandela Effect, but for lunk-headed blondes from Norwich. Look too close at the art and you will miss the wider picture. Lean in too near to the masterpiece and you will forget Harley Judge even exists.

Anyway: once the bump-landing buzz of leaving the Love Island villa, coming back to the UK, appearing on Good Morning Britain exactly once and securing PA and Instagram #sponsored #content deals whirlwind wears off, our beautiful sex babies are thrust into a sort of lurching fame purgatory: where do they go, from here? Do they double-down on their fame, try to multiply it? Do they use it for good? Evil? Wealth? Sex? How do they pursue careers, now, when they are known solely for mugging each other off, shyly doing mouth stuff behind a duvet and playing party games in HD slo-motion? Where do you go when your main achievement in life is getting a full sleeve without once passing out?

Tricky, isn't it. Hard to really know. Let's guess, though:

Camilla & Jamie are a lovely couple who both love books and being good people and having actual conversations where they don't say the word "graft", but Camilla also spends 40 to 80 percent of her time pulling two fronds of hair out of her eyes so she can sob unobstructed, and something about Jamie just screams "IBIZA BOAT PARTY TURBOSHAGGER", so I think in about six weeks – when she has seen his world (sabreing a bottle of prosecco over a paddling pool full of 20-year-olds to start an internationally judged wet T-shirt competition; saying "I'll be with you in a sec, babe" and going into a locked room with a load of men in suits wearing sunglasses and not emerging for an hour-and-a-half, pupils like saucers; spending six grand of money "we said we were saving for the refugees, Jamie!" on a single watch) and he has seen hers (meekly posing w/ a whole squad of homeless children at a shelter in India; a literal 5AM yoga class oh my god; somehow spending £50 at Whole Foods on the ingredients for one vegetarian couscous meal) they will float slowly apart.

Fame-wise: Camilla will do one to two appearances on British TV, but they will stop booking her when she starts really bringing the vibe down by reading out a phone essay about starvation (*1); Jamie will live in Ibiza for four years before moving back in with his mum.

Jonny from Love Island kisses like someone who's just jogged for a bus doing a balloon, in that he closes his eyes and just inhales as hard as it is possible to inhale in the hope that somehow, alchemy-like, this action will turn into sex. Fair play, though, because for some reason it does work: after Camilla and then Tyla in the villa, he's since moved on to Tyne-Lexy and Chyna (*2) on the outside world, and with that data we can only surmise he is working himself methodically down the list of Love Island girls in order of screen minutes – Danielle, then Amelia, then finally Ellisha-Jade – until it's just Jonny, alone at the Love Island afterparty, eyes half-closed on the vodka-cokes, grinding sexlessly against that rollbar jeep all the girls came in on. Career-wise he's going to do a few club appearances then go back to driving his dad's car on Instagram and pretending he's rich again.

Chyna could go either way: I actually think she could convince a lo-budget fashion label with "Miss" in the title to give her a crack at designing and promoting a line of bikinis and beach cover-ups for next summer, so it's Chyna, pouting and dipping on Instagram video, the rictus grin of the sponsored ad content deliverer, telling "all my girls… if you want to get beach ready… get to Miss Chevious dot com and get YOUR Chyna Ellis-inspired beachwear… now with 40 percent off flip-flops!"; or she could just get a job as a Westfield MUA and appears as a floating head on the "remember them?" section of next summer's Celebrity Juice: Love Island special. Fame is a fickle business. Could really go either way.

Dom is always squinting in such a way that makes me think that literally all sources of light are an inconvenience to him, and I'm pretty sure the intensive schedule of club appearances he has booked up until October (*3) are only going to aggravate that, so any fame or non-fame he will ever have will be entirely dictated by whether he gets to a doctor and diagnoses whatever eye disease he's suffering, and then he can rep whatever charity that has while being a third-string Boohoo Men model and occasionally going for dinner with Calum Best. Three Sun kiss-and-tells in ten days puts an end to his Jess relationship by about, ooh, September? Yeah.

So Jess, though, is a much more enticing prospect as a fame haver, and here's my theory:

Ignore for a moment that Kim Kardashian in her current iteration is a hyper glam wholesome multi-millionaire goddess: she used to have a really toothy and unpractised smile and would turn up to literally any celebrity event she could get invited to. She was mainly only known as Paris Hilton's "friend" up until 2007, when the sex tape leaked, and then everything snowballed from there. Slowly, surely, with exceptionally careful management, she has picked her way up the sheer cliff face of fame: from the party circuit to the dedicated reality TV show, to the ill-advised clothing boutique, to cheap branded perfumes, then cracking thru to megafame: rapper husband, Vogue covers, unassailable mega-fame. It's hard to imagine Kim Kardashian before Kim Kardashian, that revisionist history would have us believe she appeared to us, like Venus in the shell, fully-formed: but actually, for a really long time, she wore babydoll dresses over jeans and almost certainly, behind the scenes, said "that's hot".

So I ask you: who in British culture right now has glossy brown hair like a beautiful pedigree dog, and an eye-poppingly curvaceous bikini body, and a million Instagram followers, and is willing to sell literally anything, for any amount of money, and most of all has the steely-eyed determination to do anything to progress their fame, until they are untouchable, until they are close to a god? Jess Shears off Love Island. Give her six months, she'll be being linked with a mid-table Premier League footballer as a transparently pragmatic way of making headlines. Year-and-a-half and she'll be in the top four. Two years, she won't need any sports stars: she'll be an athlete to her own fame, more dedicated than anyone else in the country, getting up earlier, working harder, selling out more. ITV2 show (Jess Shears: My World) about her wearing massive sunglasses and part-exchanging her Porsche and holding a white mug of tea with her legs crossed while talking to her mum about her love life; Strictly week four exit; autobiography (Shear Determination); fashion line. By 2020 she'll be a billionaire.

Part of me wants to say their fame is going to be very quick-burn. Marcel: exactly two Blazin' Squad reunion shows which go fine-if-not-amazingly then get abruptly curtailed when six of them get arrested for possession; Gabby briefly becomes a sort of female Mr Motivator in a poorly-received This Morning segment where they try to get Eamonn Holmes to learn how to touch his ankles. Both fade eventually to obscurity, soothed and consoled only by their deep and respectful love for one another.

But another part of me cannot shake the words "Marvin and Rochelle Humes'. Marvin and Rochelle Humes are the most room temperature glass of water couple on the planet, yet have turned that into a sterling back-up presenter duo career, with Marvin as a chart DJ and Rochelle as a glowing mum-of-two. Tell me you can't see Marcel absolutely bossing a three-hour chart show on Heart FM. Gabby, swollen and radiant, on Loose Women talking about her vitamin regime. Both of them doing red carpet interviews for a 12-second segment on an ITV2 news round-up. It's nailed-on. The faster these two get married and become "The Somervilles", the better for their career.

Montana's got "already famous person dabbles in vlogging, becomes wildly successful without anyone over the age of 18 noticing it, double-platinum book about 'loving yourself no matter what', £20 million net worth by 25" written all over her. Alex can go back to eating chicken and brown rice on a three-hour schedule and emotionlessly selling creatine on Twitter.

This summer Mike is basically focused on shagging, shagging, shagging, shagging, shagging and shagging, then shagging some more, shagging, posing in longline T-shirts while looking off to middle distance in the spitting drizzle, then shagging some more, shagging until he has to be taken to a Majorcan A&E to be put back on a liquids drip, shagging so much he loses a stone and a half, shagging so much they have to put his legs – buckled from months of post-coital knee collapses – in plaster. Mike Thala will shag himself into a coma this summer, just you watch.

But then I think the half-life of his career, when you think he's shagged himself out of the spotlight forever, is actually going to do a half-turn and twist: Mike the Turboshagging Longline T-Shirt Wearer is a sort of Lad Alpha, the kind of bloke the lads love to admire, and every shagging scalp and sheesha lounge selfie is going to add to that, until he has an army of them, a pliant army of lads. What I'm saying is Mike only needs a decent social media manager who knows which viral tweets to quote with a line of cry-laugh emojis; he only needs one Daily Mail outrage story about how he slagged off another Love Island contestant in a series of tweets; he only needs one Snapchat Story where he poses with the sleeping nude backs of the two girls he just shagged, Mike with his tongue out, Mike grinning, and bang: Mike from Love Island is a sort of one man Dapper Laughs-Unilad hybrid, 1.2 million likes on Facebook, Banter King. Then he'll take it too far and rev the whole thing into the sea.

Book him in for a turtleneck Newsnight apology after he calls Helen Mirren a "sket" in about 16 months, followed swiftly by near total fame-death.

Close your eyes and picture this scene: Georgia off Love Island, stuttering over the autocue, fear-eyed and trying to talk This Morning viewers through the rigorous terms and conditions of the text-and-win £30,000 and a holiday competition, spliced with footage of her looking at her own feet while walking on a beach in Croatia. That's going to happen, isn't it? That's not even a guess, that's a premonition of the future. Sam will appear on Geordie Shore for three episodes before getting chinned to death by Scotty T, RIP.

Climb up the mountain, as the sun sets. The path before you is orange and dusty. A long day is at your back, sweat is on your brow. Look down at the savannah below you, at the long shadows among the trees. The journey up the hill is shorter than the one back down it, but half as sweet. Work up to the top, power to the top. There, as the prophecy called it, is the hollow cave. Step inside as the red sun dips beneath the horizon. The air is cool in here, crisper than you've felt in days. There, deep in the shadows, a sort of sparkle: step closer, step towards it. Lo, the golden shrine: just as They said it was, more glorious here in reality than the stories could ever say. Lean forward to the stone tablet nestled in the centre. Wipe the dust off with your hands. Read the ancient runes aloud, read them as they say:

Olivia and Chris will split up and he asks her earnestly if he can adopt 100 dogs, and then she'll reform as a sort of glam Katie Hopkins, willing to say horrible things in an escalatingly angry voice while sitting sideways on during a Loose Women panel about abortion rights. Coleen Nolan apologising for Liv's language following an outburst about school catchment areas. That sort of thing.

Two halves of the same heart, Kem and Chris goes like this: ITV2 show called Bromance where they go around the UK learning things – Kem in the Royal Artillery Museum, learning about cannons; Chris and Kem in a field, seconds after being told where honey comes from, staring at each other and saying "my head's gone" – before a genuinely good novelty single, then disappearing for a bit and coming back as suit-wearing national treasures, Ant & Dec 2.0, Mel & Sue with more sexual chemistry, the new presenting duo this country craves, needs. I don't want to live in a world where Kem & Chris aren't constantly on my television, practising complex high five routines. Stay pure, sweet boys. Stay true.

@joelgolby

(*1) There is a slim, slim chance she will take over the presenting duties on Wimbledon, Crufts and dressage, actually, because it's hard for the BBC to find acceptable TV-ready posh ladies, and Barker and Balding can only go on so long, and so there's a real chance Camilla could break into Fogle territory here actually, if she rows across the Mediterranean sea with Ellen MacArthur for Sports Relief or something and cracks a career out of that. Someone has to end the tyranny of Fogle. It may as well be her.

(*2) A STUDY OF WOMEN'S NAMES IN THE UK CIRCA 2017, BASED ONLY ON DATA TAKEN FROM LOVE ISLAND

— Golby, Joel R., Here's What Every Love Island Contestant is Going to Do After Love Island, VICE.com/en_uk/, (July 2017): Page 1

INTRO: Yo what the fuck happened in the year 1995 that made every new parent cram a "Y" into their daughter's first or first-second name? There's not meant to be that many Ys in there

METHODOLOGY: Of the 15 women who entered Love Island this year, four of them had an unnecessarily first name spelling perversion – Tyla, Ellisha-Jade, Chyna and Tyne-Lexy – and two had a hyphenated first name – Ellisha-Jade and Tyne-Lexy, which I'm sorry is just too many names for only two people to have, that is just such a fucking massive amount of names – meaning that over a quarter (26.6 percent) of the available women in Love Island this year had either too many names or a unique misspelling, with 13.3 percent having both.

CONCLUSION: If you want to enter Love Island next year and you are a female, having a double-barrelled first name will increase your chances of getting onto the show, however with the caveat that, based on the data in front of us, you absolutely will not find love (Tyla, Ellisha-Jade, Tyne-Lexy), you possibly will get voted out first, so personally and sexually unpopular are you (Tyne-Lexy), and there's a real chance you'll only last about three days all-in (Chyna, Ellisha-Jade). So in conclusion: if you want a three-to-five day holiday next year with slim-to-no fingering, Love Island with a double first name could be the one.

(*3) Sidenote: I think you can learn more from British culture by reading the club list of all the booked appearances Dom from Love Island has until October – Pryzm, Kooki, Liquid; Cameo, Moka, Secrets; JJs, Shoosh, Oceana – than you could reading any book, doing any degree or studying any modern history. Nothing says more about Britain in 2017 than the words "Dom Lever will be at Velvet in Nuneaton, £1 drinks with a wristband".