Farewell to Love Island USA’s IJBOL Couple

Love Island USA’s Corbin Mims and Parmida Keshani were the Platonic ideal of what a non–Love Island viewer thinks a Love Island couple is like: two people telling each other how hot they are, back and forth, seemingly forever. When the duo returned from their Casa Amor like Boris and Natasha, it felt like they were being positioned as two of season eight’s great villains, but the more time they spent together, the more it became clear that Corbin and Parmida were funny and strange and, yes, unrelentingly horny for each other. On Sunday night, they received the least votes from the public vote and were kicked out of the villa. The vote — which was framed around compatibility — might not have been totally wrong, but that doesn’t mean I won’t miss them. They were the two weirdest people there.

In Corbin’s early weeks on Love Island, viewers often criticized him for sounding like a robot — his deep voice and generic responses reminded people of AI. During his courtship with Parmida at Casa Amor, watching the two of them speak to each other was like watching bots have a full-blown conversation on X. A particularly notable instance was when Parmida, envisioning their life beyond Love Island together, pictured the two of them driving in a car together, alternating who drove and who played the music. Rather than ask a follow-up question — like where they might be going or what music they might be listening to — Corbin replied, “I’m scared to get into the car with you” with no additional context. There was a kind of clipped, unnatural appeal to the edit they were getting, suggesting this was the best the producers could find. Their interactions, in turn, were rarely intimate or sexy but affably mundane.

Though their return to the villa was one of the more heated introductions — the girls booing and shouting “Tomato!” at Corbin for his blatant disrespect toward Kenzie during the Hearts on Fire challenge — Corbin and Parmida quickly assumed a more amiable position among the other Islanders, who mostly regarded them with amused bafflement. Despite their “lustful” coupling up, no one seemed to harbor much ill will toward them. They were clownish and peculiar, not causing drama or arguing with other couples once they settled in. But contestants in the villa didn’t have a a better read on them than the viewers at home. Parmida announced they were closed off to almost complete silence. Was that good? Bad? Did anyone care? When Kenzie voted against them on the July 3 episode, Parmida defended the nature of their relationship by saying that it only looked lustful in part because they’re both “so good-looking.” The edit panned around to the other Islanders turning away to laugh at the shallowness of her argument.

When the two got the boot after the karaoke challenge on the July 5 episode, it was clear during their villa good-byes that the boys and girls liked having these two around, if not as a couple than undoubtedly as individuals. Corbin shed tears as he packed up, to the shock of his fellow boys. “We broke the robot!” Bryce joked. When Sincere called Corbin’s time on the show a “generational run,” it was hard to know what exactly he was talking about. Did he mean Corbin was the most romantic? The hottest? The funniest? I think what Sincere meant, perhaps, is that there was truly no other Islander like Corbin — for better, worse, or somewhere in between. With one final “Fuck, bro!” shouted back at the group, Corbin and Parmida left the villa hand in hand and headed back to their home planet.