Love Island Star’s Secret Heartbreak: The Hidden Loss Doctors Couldn’t Detect
Is it just me, or does watching Love Island these days feel more like trying to navigate an obstacle course surrounded by drama, rather than hunting for true love? In an era where the villa churns out more plot twists than a daytime soap—and most “lasting” connections expire faster than a half-eaten avocado in July—Olivia Bowen’s story is a total anomaly. She found lasting love on reality TV of all places! Yet, just when you think the universe is smiling on a love story, life throws its curveballs—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes invisible to the outside world. Olivia’s journey through the highs of romance and the deeply personal loss of a twin in pregnancy reminds me that the most powerful things we experience are often the ones nobody sees coming . This piece dives into Olivia’s candor about vanishing twin syndrome, loss, and resilience, and trust me, it’s a story worth your time—just don’t expect it to be all sunshine and swimming pools . LEARN MORE
Warning: This article contains discussion of baby loss which some readers may find distressing.
Olivia Bowen is one of the biggest success stories from Love Island after marrying the man that she met on the show.
Considering the various pieces of drama we’ve seen on this season of the dating show, which has seen two of the men leave the show over different allegations, while another woman left just days before the final, it’s hard to believe that people used to actually discover long-term partners after meeting on the ITV2 show.
However, that proved to be the case for Olivia and Alex, who finished as runners-up on the 2016 series before announcing their engagement a year later.
Sadly, their love story hasn’t been completely smooth sailing, as when Olivia was around nine weeks pregnant with twins, she lost one of her babies in the womb. Around 10 weeks later, her daughter Sienna was thriving and continuing to grow inside her belly, but the other baby had effectively disappeared.
Olivia and Alex married in 2018 (Karwai Tang/WireImage)
It was only later on that Olivia discovered that she had gone through something known as ‘vanishing twin syndrome’, which occurs when one embryo in a multiple pregnancy stops developing and is either absorbed by the mother’s body or by the surviving twin.
The 32-year-old recently opened up about her loss on the ‘We Need To Talk’ podcast with Paul C Bronson.
She said: “So vanishing twin syndrome is something i’d never heard of before and a lot of people hadn’t. I think that was the most shocking thing about it. After it happened I started to look into it and it’s a really common thing. What happens is you have a twin pregnancy and one of the babies for whatever reason doesn’t survive you don’t lose it. It’s not like a miscarriage where sometimes you bleed and you have pain. It quite literally vanishes so in my case we lost the baby around nine weeks but Sienna was absolutely fine.”
Olivia gave birth to Sienna in 2025, having had her first child back in 2022, but even with her daughter growing healthily inside her, Olivia still had to deal with the heartbreak of losing her other child, something which was a very strange feeling for her as she continued to see the baby in later scans.
She added: “Sienna was thriving but the other baby had no heartbeat but it was still in there until I was 19 weeks and then it disappeared into my body. It’s the most weird thing to get your head around because you’re so happy you’ve got that little baby thriving in there growing perfectly and then you see the baby that’s passed is still in there every scan you have. The one thing that made all the difference is talking about it publicly.
“The amount of women I connected to and learned from it felt like being wrapped up by people that had had the same experience i feel incredibly lucky that people trust me with their stories.”
If you need support and advice following a pregnancy loss, you can contact the Tommy’s team at [email protected]. You can also call them for free on 0800 014 7800, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.
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