There are more than a few parallels between Nic and Olandria from Love Island USA Season 7 and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. No, Nic isn’t the prince of the world’s most dangerous colonizer, but he is a 6’3” green-eyed model, tall, gentle, affectionate, and desired. And like Meghan, Olandria landed the man many people silently or openly believe she shouldn’t have.

For Meghan, the offense was daring to be even a little Black in the house of empire. For Olandria, it’s being a dark-skinned, Southern Black woman with sharp, striking features and having a white man choose her, protect her, and publicly adore her in a space that historically treats Black women as the friend, the filler, the footnote.

The backlash, in both cases, reveals more about the public than about the couples themselves.

When Meghan and Harry’s relationship became public, the British press lost its mind. Headlines turned feral. Every move was villainized. Meghan became the destroyer of tradition, the manipulator, the problem. The public simply could not accept that this woman – biracial, American, assertive, proud – was not only chosen but defended. Harry’s open love was treated as weakness. Meghan’s presence was framed as intrusion. It wasn’t love, it was betrayal.

Now, on Love Island USA, Olandria and Nic face a modern, Instagram-filtered version of the same dynamic. But instead of calling her a manipulator, the language has evolved.

“They’re being pushed by producers.”

“It’s giving fake.”

“There’s no spark.”

“This feels forced.”

Calling a couple “forced” or a “production couple” is a subtler kind of violence – one that casts doubt on the authenticity of their connection without needing to say the quiet part out loud. It suggests that Olandria could not be the natural choice. That the show must have nudged Nic in her direction to check a diversity box. That her desirability is not intrinsic but engineered. That it is not chemistry, it’s optics.

Let’s be honest about who this narrative serves and who it excludes.

This isn’t just discomfort from white viewers. Olandria and Nic also face scrutiny from some Black women, many of whom have internalized the same beauty standards that have long devalued them. There are Black women online questioning whether Olandria is “pretty enough” to have pulled Nic. Some of it is jealousy disguised as objectivity. But much of it is pain – the ache of never having been loved out loud, never having been chosen in the daylight, never having seen someone like themselves be the fantasy. For them, Olandria represents both what they want and what they have been taught they cannot have.

Then there is the Black male backlash – sharp, bitter, and revealing. Some Black men, raised in a culture that told them Black women were loud, combative, unworthy, chose to seek validation through whiteness. They have spent years positioning proximity to white women as status, as proof they have made it. But here comes Nic, a white man, standing ten toes down for a Black woman. Unbothered. Clear-eyed. Soft. Loving. That dissonance stings. It challenges the lie they were sold and the choices they made based on it.

So they lash out. Not at the systems that taught them to devalue Blackness, but at Olandria, for disrupting the narrative.

That is the part no one wants to say out loud. A Black woman being adored disrupts everyone’s fantasy, including some of our own.

Because her being loved this way – freely, publicly, completely – forces people to confront how much they have settled, compromised, or participated in their own erasure.

So no, Olandria and Nic are not “forced.”

They are forbidden in the eyes of a culture still clinging to the lie that Black women must earn love through pain, silence, or exceptionalism.

They are not a production couple.

They are a problem for people who cannot accept that a Black woman can be the one chosen first, chosen boldly, chosen without apology – not despite who she is, but because of it.

And that is what some people – white, Black, and in between – will always try to tear down.

But the truth remains.

She was wanted. Chosen. Loved.

And for some, that is the most unforgivable thing of all.