It’s been 10 whole years since Olivia Bowen burst onto our screens in the second series of Love Island. With no expectations of finding love and just excited to spend a summer abroad, the Essex-born star ended up walking out with her now-husband, Alex Bowen.
Speaking to us from her new Spanish villa just days after moving in, she admits she is fully embracing the chaos of family life, as she is joined by her eldest son Abel, four, for part of the interview.
It’s a very different picture to the one she would have painted for herself a decade ago when she decided to sign up for the ITV2 reality show.
“I didn’t believe in love back then. I didn’t believe in finding ‘the one’. I didn’t believe in getting married, in any of that. I just shunned it because I thought it’s easier to say I don’t want it, and then if I don’t get it, I’m not embarrassed,” she admits.
Olivia had a run of difficult relationships growing up and was cheated on multiple times by her exes. She says it led to her having a rather dim view of love.
When she met Alex, she was terrified it would all go wrong before it even started. She tells us, “When I met him, that was one of my biggest fears – that history would repeat itself.”
Even when it came to Alex, the pressure surrounding marriage and motherhood had her digging her heels in. She says, “The more people said it, the more I’d be like, ‘No, I don’t want it.’
“I’m a bit of a control freak, and I was like, ‘I will decide when I want to do it.’ But it’s not only that. I have friends that have struggled to get pregnant or have had to go through years of IVF. I have friends that have lost babies, and I think we have to start making people realise that it’s not OK to keep asking, because so many people are dealing with a lot of trauma surrounding that.”
While pregnant with baby Siena, now 10 months, Olivia experienced Vanishing Twin Syndrome, which resulted in the loss of one of her unborn twins. It was an important topic for Olivia to discuss in her new book, Lost Until Love, and she hopes her own experience can support others going through similar experiences.
“The grief is so hard. And people deal with it in different ways,” she says. “For me, I’m a talker and an over-sharer. I’m an open book, and it’s always helped me speaking to people. But when I went through that, it took me a couple of weeks to even speak to Alex about it. We dealt with it in a very different way to each other.
“He was really upset at the start and then shut off. I felt vulnerable talking about it, but after the response I’ve had from fans, I realised it was the right decision.”
Fans of Love Island have seen Olivia and Alex’s relationship play out for a decade and she says it was important that her other half had a key role in her book, too.
A conversation between the pair is one of its key chapters, and gives fans a lovely insight into their relationship. “There’s a lot of heavy stuff in the book, and I didn’t want it to all be too heavy,” she says. “Alex and I… well, we just bounce off each other and it’s fun. It breaks up the book, and it gives some light relief.”
Elsewhere, Olivia opens up about her childhood, which wasn’t always a walk in the park. Her parents divorced when she was young and she admits that her relationship with her dad was “fractured”, but in time they managed to reconnect.
School was also a particularly tough time for Olivia, who struggled with her eating habits and peer pressure. Unhealthy relationships with her exes and struggles with depression and anxiety followed, but they have only informed her own experience of motherhood.
She is determined not to let her own experiences impact her children. “I think you have to remember to put yourself first. When you become a mum, you’re told you can’t put yourself first again.
“You have to fill up your own cup, and you have to do things for yourself. I had to take myself to therapy, and in turn, my children get the best version of me and the best mum that they can have, because I’ve really worked on myself.”
Olivia hopes her book can help those who have faced hardships in their lives. She says, “I don’t have it all figured out. No way. But what I have learnt has positively impacted my life and helped me deal with things better than I did as a teenager or as a young woman.
“A lot of the time, when you go through something terrible, you think, ‘God, why did that happen to me?’ You don’t know how you’re ever going to turn it around. But I hope that everyone can give themselves the time and the grace to learn from those lessons, and move on.”
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