Tips on Finding Love / how to find love - from stars of FBOY ISLAND
Introducing John Middleton, 27, a Linguistics lecturer at the University of Auckland; Greg Hunter, 24, a sailing coach, model, and musician; and Ross Ringwood, 25, administrator and model. Alex Casey, a senior writer at The Spinoff, said, “I cannot look [Ross] in the eye.” I also cannot look Ross in the eye, because he is my cousin. This man has seen me feed my brother under the dinner table like a dog and I am coming to him for relationship advice.
In 2022, all three men starred in TVNZ+’s FBOY Island NZ. The reality TV show is basically a male-manipulator mashup of Love Island. Twenty men and three women compete for a $50,000 cash prize. As host Shavaughn Ruakere explains in the show’s trailer, “Ten of [the men] are self-proclaimed ‘nice guys’ looking for love, and the other ten are every heterosexual woman’s worst, best nightmare.” The challenge? For the women to successfully determine which of the men are ‘nice guys’, and which of them are fuck boys.
The show had a very public casting controversy late last year, resulting in re-edits, advertisers pulling promotion, and an overall shit storm across NZ news media. Hearing I was planning this interview, my friend sent me her MDIA306 essay on how the show romanticises misogyny, reinforces the patriarchy, and produces a strictly hetero-normative understanding of gender and sexuality.
But I knew that for the ‘Cupid’ issue of Salient, these were the right guys to come to.
I’ll set the scene: it’s a Monday night after work at Ross’ family home in Auckland. Greg’s got his leather jacket on and pearls round his neck, meaning to go out, but he keeps getting distracted by our super in-depth discussions. John’s chilling on the floor. When he arrived, he shook my hand, then instantly put his hair in a business-like man bun. Ross is petting the dog he’s dog sitting. I’m eating some good potato chips. But for this interview, I feel like I should’ve brought popcorn.
What are your three tips for a first date?
“Leave,” John says.
“Three tips!” the boys remind him.
“Put the tip in, then leave,” he corrects. “I hate first dates, they’re so boring.”
John elaborates. In his past, depending on ‘how bad he thought the date was gonna go’, he’d set an alarm on his phone that sounded like an incoming phone call. Hour-long first date? The alarm would go off at just under an hour. He’d let it ring. Then he’d pretend to look at the caller ID. He’d shut it off. “To make it seem like I was a good person, I wouldn’t ever take the call while I was with a girl, right,” John explains. That’s best case scenario. Worst, if he wasn’t feeling the date, he’d use the ‘call’ to suggest he had somewhere else to be—an “excuse to get out ASAP”.
Ross and Greg have different perspectives. On the TV show, they both chose to play as ‘nice guys’, not ‘fboys’ like lecturer John. That meant splitting any potential prize money with the co-winner, instead of ditching her and stealing all her money.
“Pick a restaurant you both like,” Ross says. “Bond over the cuisine.”
“Be comfortable enough in yourself to just relax and allow something natural to blossom,” Greg says, passionately. He’s leaning forward to drill his eyes directly through mine and into my mind. I feel like he’s a school counsellor giving me an intervention.
“And, second, have a surprise [prepared]. Like, something that she’s not expecting. A little dessert or a little after-date walk or something,” Ross says. “Third, remember shit. Oh, she likes cars, this area, this juice, whatever.”
Greg asks if you should write down a list afterwards of things to remember. Ross shrugs and says “not necessarily”. But, he continues, “Imagine if all goes well, six months from now you’re like, oh by the way, I remembered this from our first date.”
How do you ask someone out?
“If you’re hitting on a girl and you find out she’s got a boyfriend and she’s not willing to cheat on him,” John says, “just wait. They’ll break up. You’ll have your opportunity.”
The others hum noncommittally. All three of them seem to agree that a girl with a boyfriend is not off-limits. Also, side note, they don’t believe in pick-up lines. Just like, as a concept. That was a whole discussion. Did I even need to prep interview questions?
“Fail. Fail fast. Strikeout,” Ross says suddenly, like an inspirational Wii Sports coach. “You’re going to fail a hundred times. But the point is, the 101th time, when you find someone who says yes, that gives you more of a boost than a hundred no’s.”
“He’s always getting dogged,” Greg adds.
“It sucks when you’re 70 no’s in, and you’ve got 30 more no’s to go, and you’re like, ‘oh man’. But you gotta do it. Put yourself out there. Everyone’s so afraid of rejection. And as soon as you experience it, you realise it doesn’t actually matter.”
Greg runs a hand through his hair and looks genuinely tortured. Leading on from Ross, he tells us the key is “not to give a shit” or overthink too much. He says just go for it. “Yeah, I’m really cut [when I get rejected]. But I grow from it,” he says. “We go to the gym to break ourselves down to get bigger and stronger. It’s kind of the same thing with love.”
What are your red flags?*
Pretty sure John misheard me. “I think you should try to find out every single girl’s red flags and try to be all of them,” he exclaims. “Because they’ll say that they hate red flags…” Then he winks across the room. Greg squints back.
I decide it’s time to move onto the next question, and quickly.
Have you ever fallen in love?
Ross leans back on the couch. “I felt like, when I was your age, I was so, like… oh, I don’t know… it’s so hard to know,” he says. The dog barks. He gives her a scratch. Randomly, I think how weird it is that we’re sitting on the same couch where my brother and I used to perch, watching over Ross’ shoulder as he’d played video games. We must’ve been no older than seven. He would’ve been age 12, but to me, back then, he looked twice as old. “But you are an adult,” he continues. “Fun fact for you. Nothing changes. I’m still a kid too.”
“We’re still kids, for sure,” Greg agrees. “But I’d like to say we’re pretty woke… like, I studied a lot of shit about cosmology, and with Ross’ philosophy, we come up with some great ideas. And ultimately, we both know what we currently know to be ^facts. Which is that you live and you die. Everyone dies. [...] When you start to take that point of view, it really makes the little things like love mean less. Because what’s the point?”
“I completely disagree,” Ross says.
John rolls his eyes in my direction. Greg and Ross have been friends for yonks before ever signing up to FBOY Island NZ. They’ve completely dodged the question, but apparently their conversations end up like this all the time. (Allegedly, mostly in spa pools, under the stars (five feet apart, of course, cause they’re not gay), while really, really high.)
What does love feel like to you?
“Love doesn’t exist. It’s a chemical emotion. Love isn’t, like, mathematically or fundamentally real. We create it in our minds,” Greg tells Ross.
“We create it in our minds, why isn’t that real?” Ross replies.
“Because you can’t calculate it mathematically.”
“That’s your definition of real?”
“Physics is real. And you can calculate that mathematically,” Greg says. “Love, you cannot.”
Any final words of advice?
“Love is such a fucking waste of time,” Greg rants. I can’t help but wonder if he’s still bitter after Coco rejected him when he poured his heart out to her on the show.
“Strike out as many times as possible,” Ross advises. “You’ll get there.”
“Don’t be a loser,” John says. “Like, girls smell desperation, and I hate desperation, and I hate losers. Losers are desperate people. Don’t do that.”
Well. Anyway. None of these men left FBOY Island NZ with prize money or a new partner, but they left with some real points to make. Now the question is: what do I do with this advice? Put it on a t-shirt? A mug? Welly gal pals? On my friend’s MDIA306 discussion threads? I leave my cousin’s family home with no answers, only a vague and concerning sense of urgency, and the sweet, sweet aftertaste of Honey Soy Copper Kettle Chips. I hope you take from this something similar.