Love Island’s First Winner Jessica Hayes Reveals Shocking Reason for Celibacy

Jessica Hayes, the first ever winner of Love Island in 2015, is reflecting on an extraordinary decade.

Over the years the iconic ITV dating show has been running, more than 300 contestants have taken part – professing to be searching for love, only to find themselves caught up in public splits, scandals and shockers.

When it comes to counting the number of contestants who triumphed in the long-term love stakes, however, it only takes one hand.

‘Do you know who I think has a lovely relationship? Olivia Bowen,’ Jess says, referencing the 31 year old who appeared on the show in 2016, the year after Jess won it. Olivia, then Buckland, is still with Alex Bowen, whom she met on the island. They have two children and seem very happy.

Jess also mentions Cara De La Hoyde, who won the second series with her Love Island conquest Nathan Massey. They are still together and also have two children.

Jess is delighted for them – but less so for herself. ‘It makes me want to cry myself to sleep when I see that,’ she says of the successful couples, ‘because I’m like, ‘Why not me?’

Jessica Hayes with Max Morley in the first season of Love Island 

After two failed engagements, the Love Island winner says she’s off men completely

Whatever the game plan was when she signed up for the show, Jess, now 32, didn’t anticipate being a single mother with two failed engagements, two children to different fathers and a heart that has been smashed to the point where she doesn’t know if she even believes in love any more.

And sex? Give it a rest. She’s off men completely.

Meet the Love Island winner who is happy to say publicly that she’s celibate. She’s done with sex even more than she’s done with love, although it’s complicated because for her the two are very much entwined.

‘It’s a pointless activity,’ she says of sex when you aren’t in a truly loving relationship. ‘I’m not having any, and I don’t miss it. I don’t want it. It could be years before I have it again, who knows. I’ve just got no desire for it. I’m not into one-night stands and, believe it or not, I never have been.’

Really? This is the girl who arrived at the Love Island villa – who set the tone, no less – seemingly up for anything.

‘It’s funny because I presented this image that I was this sex-obsessed girl, and I just didn’t care, but I’m just not interested unless I really connect with a guy.’

She reckons, if we are being honest, most women are the same.

‘Men don’t need that connection. They will just…,’ she pauses, ‘anything, to put it bluntly. Prove me different. I’ve never seen it proven, not in my experience. I’m sure there are respectful men out there. Let me know when you find one.’

It’s all so different from the hope and enthusiasm she felt back when she was on the show.

With Series 12 on our screens now, those who watched the early days of Love Island, will still remember Jess, who had been working in a bank in Gloucester before entering the villa. She was outspoken and brimming with attitude, a fact that helped her win. She also ‘won’, supposedly, the heart of Max Morley, a professional cricketer from Huddersfield.

For about ten minutes, they were the Posh and Becks of that era, and she says she was properly loved-up.

‘It’s a pointless activity,’ Jessica says of sex when you aren’t in a truly loving relationship

For about ten minutes, Jessica and Max were the Posh and Becks of that era, and she says she was properly loved-up

‘Then 22, I was so naïve and quite vulnerable, looking back,’ she says.

‘It was the first year of the show. Back then we didn’t even know if anyone was watching the thing.

‘I thought I was getting a free holiday and a bit of cash at the end, and that maybe I’d find a nice guy. Up until then, I’d been meeting idiots, basically. My relationships had been disastrous. Mind you, they still are now.’

Afterwards she emerged, blinking, into the spotlight. So did Max, also 22. As a couple, they lasted less than three months before he cheated on her and she publicly branded him ‘vile’.

It was inevitable, she says. ‘You come out and you are straight into this mad world of partying, nightclubs. Women were chucking themselves at Max. We didn’t stand a chance.’

She’s still annoyed that they had to split the £50,000 prize money, because she believes he entered the villa at the point where he had already seen she was popular.

‘So, I do feel he targeted me,’ she says, ‘but, as I say, I was young and naïve.’

A more mature young woman might have put a chunk of the prize money into a pension fund and got on with the life she had been planning before Love Island, but things don’t work like that.

The reason she applied in the first place, Jess explains, is that she was a ‘free spirit who didn’t want a nine-to-five job’. She provided the mould for the army of ‘former Love Island stars’, aka influencers, who would follow. ‘That was all just starting,’ she says. ‘TikTok didn’t even exist. Instagram had only just started. You didn’t have the big brand collaborations – that came later – so we were all just finding our feet a bit.’

Ten years on, the world is awash with Love Island influencers. While the likes of Molly-Mae Hague have managed to make millions, what of the majority, like Jess, perched precariously on the middle rungs of the fame ladder?

She is keen to point out she has had a ten-year stint of making a living out of Love Island, her money having come from working with fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands. ‘How many people can say that they’ve had a career out of it?’ she says.

What has been difficult, though, is reconciling her career with family life. In 2019, Jess became a mother for the first time, having baby Presley with her then fiancé Dan Lawry. She had actually known Dan before she entered Love Island, but when they started dating in 2018, she reckoned he was ‘the one’.

He wasn’t. The couple suffered a devastating miscarriage in 2020, with Jess losing the baby she had already named Ted at 19 weeks. Her relationship floundered and, by 2021, she was single.

Then, eight months on, she met a property developer called Zeb (she declines to give his surname) and, as she puts it, while rolling her eyes, ‘fell madly head over heels in love’.

‘We met in a spa, quite randomly. I hadn’t been looking. I was at the stage of ‘ugh, men, no’, but he was handsome, successful. I’d find myself smiling at his texts. He swept me off my feet. Treated me really well. He would spoil me. I thought, ‘This is amazing’.’ The engagement was shared with celebrity magazines and life was, outwardly, perfect.

Last year she gave birth to her second child, daughter Zendaya Rose. But the relationship was struggling. ‘It was rocky even during my pregnancy and I was on my own for a part of it. Then I was on my own again when she was about two months old.

‘That was fun – being postpartum, hormonal, trying to deal with a toddler and a newborn, all on my own. Around Christmas last year, we called it quits. I couldn’t do it any more.’ She doesn’t want to go into too much detail, but this was clearly an unhealthy relationship during which she felt like a single mother, even when she technically wasn’t.

‘It’s so common,’ she says. ‘The women basically get left to do it all – deal with the kids, the housework, everything.

Jessica in spin-off Love Island: Aftersun in 2022

‘Having my daughter changed a lot. I thought, ‘What sort of an example am I setting for her?’ I wanted to take control.

‘I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that rows are normal, because they are not normal. I want them to know what love is – and what it isn’t. And I want to lead by example, particularly for my daughter. I know how hard it is to be a bloody woman.’

It’s fair to say that Jess doesn’t have a high opinion of men – the one exception being her dad ‘who has become my rock’. ‘He’s the one who will babysit for me, and fix things. Sometimes I say to him, ‘What was I thinking? [referring to past relationships] Why didn’t you tell me?’ But he knew I wouldn’t listen.’ She does blame herself for her ‘disastrous decisions with men’ because ‘I never liked the nice guys’.

While both fathers of her children are involved in their lives, it’s clear she has been left doing the lion’s share of the parenting – all while trying to maintain a lifestyle and career where outward glamorous appearances are everything. ‘And it’s exhausting – physically, mentally, financially.

‘It’s OK for men, isn’t it?’ she (half) jokes. ‘They can shower in peace. They can date. I don’t actually resent it because my children are my life and I’m determined to enjoy this time with them. It’s not easy, though.’

So has her Love Island background been a factor in her troubles? After all, there was none of the after-care which is now in place following the suicides of contestants Sophie Gradon, 32, in 2018, Mike Thalassitis, 26, the following year, and host Caroline Flack, 40, in 2020.

‘I don’t think those tragedies were necessarily just a Love Island thing, they were more a fame thing,’ she says. ‘It can be a lot to deal with when you are suddenly in the public eye like that. If you have mental health issues at all – and I’ve had them over the years, it’s been very up and down – then I see why it happens.’

She believes that her fame certainly affected relationships. ‘You never know whether someone is with you because of the fame, thinking that your profile might be good for their business.’

Jess seems to have had an issue about past partners questioning what she does for a living, too.

‘I think some men don’t even realise that it’s a job. They don’t actually understand what being an influencer is. They think you can just open your phone and make money or you don’t need help with the kids because what you do isn’t a proper job.

‘God forbid I ever meet a man who is intelligent and who can not only understand what I do, but help me.’

Then there is the other Love Island conundrum – the obsession with physical appearance.

Though we are doing this interview via Zoom, Jess still turns up with full, immaculate make-up, nails done, hair glossy. No mean feat when she has a 13-month-old baby and no formal childcare. How does she do it?

‘I’ve been accused, in relationships, of being obsessed with how I look, and been made to feel inadequate because of it, but keeping up appearances is part of what I do. And besides, women can’t win. If you don’t look good, you are letting yourself go.’

Who’d be a Love Island contestant then, given this honest account of how it actually pans out?

Interestingly, she doesn’t actually regret going on the show (‘how can I when I’ve had a ten-year career out of it?’), but the true test is whether she would let her daughter sign up for it? ‘Only if I could act as her manager,’ she says. ‘I was on my own, and I didn’t have a clue.’