I felt such heartbreak at seeing my baby twins on a scan knowing I would only get to meet one of them: OLIVIA BOWEN on her devastating pregnancy loss - and 'struggle to connect' with husband Alex after their son's birth

Olivia Bowen remembers the impossible contradiction of each pregnancy scan. There would be excitement at having another glimpse of the baby – a bona fide Love Island baby – growing bigger and stronger inside her. But there would also be a competing emotion: grief. ‘Every time we went for a scan, we’d see Siena in my belly and think, “Oh my God, what an amazing thing!”’ says the TV personality and influencer. ‘But then I’d always see the other one…’ Olivia’s joy at discovering she was expecting twins had been short-lived. At the eight-week scan, she was told that the second baby had no heartbeat. There was no bleeding. No pain. No evidence of miscarriage. Vanishing Twin Syndrome is a little-known pregnancy complication in which one twin dies before eventually being reabsorbed by the mother’s body. For many women the loss happens even before they know they are carrying twins. Others never see the second baby at all on a scan. In Olivia’s case, the twin that didn’t make it remained visible until around 16 weeks. It’s difficult to imagine a pregnancy experience tinged with such sadness and joy all at once, every hospital appointment offering evidence of the child she was going to meet – yet also of the one she wouldn’t. The former Love Island star – who met her husband Alex on the second series of the show – had expected that once the second twin finally ‘went’, there would be some sense of closure. There wasn’t: ‘It was heartbreaking because you couldn’t see them any more.’ After learning she was pregnant with twins, Olivia Bowen’s joy was short-lived. At the eight-week scan, she was told the second baby had no heartbeat – it was 'Vanishing Twin Syndrome' Olivia and husband Alex, who met on Love Island in 2016, celebrated the birth of their daughter Siena last August, while grieving her sister One conversation would help her reframe what had happened here. ‘Someone suggested that I think of it as them being absorbed back into you, so you’ve never really lost them. I couldn’t physically see them any more, but that’s the concept I went with. I think it was harder for Alex though, because obviously that wasn’t the case for him.’ She never gave ‘the other one’ – her daughter’s twin – a name, deciding that to do so would make the loss even more difficult to bear. ‘I do think of her as a girl, though.’ Today, the couple – who celebrated the birth of Siena last August, while grieving her sister – have a small plaque in Siena’s bedroom, which reads: ‘Every sunset, I’m with you.’ ‘What really helped was when someone told us that parents who go through Vanishing Twin Syndrome often refer to the baby they lost as their “sunset baby”, while the surviving twin is the “sunrise baby”. I always look at sunsets very differently now.’ How will she explain all this to Siena, when she is old enough, I ask? ‘God knows,’ she says, shaking her head at how complicated it is even for an adult. ‘But I will take advice on that.’ Can it really be ten years since we met Olivia Bowen, then Olivia Buckland? She was 22 when she entered the Love Island villa in 2016. Physically, she embodied the Love Island star of that era: blonde, lithe, tanned, effortlessly confident (it seemed) in a bikini, and with a personality that was sunshine personified – the sort of person so many young women watching wanted to be. She fell hard for Alex Bowen. They had sex in the villa, which she doesn’t want to be reminded of now (‘I’ve never watched the raunchy bits back, and our children are never going to watch it, let’s just say that now’), but their romance became one of the show’s genuine love stories. They married in 2018, the first couple from Love Island to wed. Their oldest child Abel arrived in 2022, by which time they were influencers – she has 3million followers on Instagram – and an established ‘brand’, even having their own ITVX show Olivia & Alex: Parenthood. The couple are one of the reality show's most genuine love stories. They married in 2018 and, in 2022, they had their first child Abel The life of their young family is well-documented on social media and the pair even have an ITV show about parenthood. (Pictured with their two children Abel and Siena) Today, they chart family life on their ‘socials’, with emphasis on the glossier side of that life. We are meeting to discuss Olivia’s autobiography, though. She laughs about how she was asked to write one as soon as she came out of the Love Island villa. She said no. ‘There were things I wasn’t ready to talk about, but I also felt I hadn’t experienced life enough.’ No such issue now. As well as pregnancy loss, the new book Lost Until Love covers her history of depression and anxiety, a near-death childbirth experience (with Siena) and incredibly candid confessions about disordered eating and – and this comes as a shock – self-harm. Sunshine-y it is not. ‘It’s crazy what life can throw at you in ten years,’ says Olivia, now 32. ‘I know that I’m just Olivia from Love Island to some people, but I have been through… things.’ Where to start with her book? She recorded the ‘voice’ for the audio version herself and says there were several points at which she had to stop, to cry. One was while reliving that Vanishing Twin scan trauma. Another was while recounting Siena’s birth last year, when she thought she was going to die. She haemorrhaged after the delivery, losing 60 per cent of the blood in her body, and required two emergency transfusions. It all unfolded so quickly, but the memory of holding Siena in her arms as she started to lose consciousness is vivid. ‘It’s funny because there are certain things you remember. I can’t remember how many people were in the room. I can’t remember what colour the sheets are, but I can remember the noise, people shouting, the numbers as they were counting – the blood stats. ‘I was holding Siena but just bleeding out and I remember trying to keep my eyes open, and I couldn’t. I felt I was going to drop her. I felt I was... going.’ ‘Alex was saying. “You’re fine, you’re fine” and I remember telling him he had to take her and guard her with his life. I also had this wave of guilt about Abel. ‘I thought, “I’ve had this other baby and I’m going to die in childbirth, and that’s so selfish.”’ It is no coincidence that Alex has since had a vasectomy. ‘He thought he was going to lose me. Afterwards, he was so upset, saying, “I can’t even look at you.”’ Despite being known for her 'sunshine-y' personality on TV, Olivia's autobiography delves into depression, anxiety, a near-death childbirth experience, disordered eating and self-harm There’s a deliberate structure to Olivia’s book. After each chapter she offers advice to her fans; the tone is of a big sister reaching out to say, ‘This is how you do life, even when it seems impossible to navigate.’ Your overriding feeling when finishing the book, though, is that you wish she’d had the same steer, because the young woman who jumps from the pages is vulnerable, and, at times, seems broken. What is shocking to learn is that the Olivia who applied for Love Island was not the carefree young woman we were presented with – one who insisted that motherhood would not be for her, interestingly (it was a defence mechanism, she believes now, ‘because I just never thought it would happen for me’). She admits now that she was a deeply anxious individual who had been prescribed antidepressants and, even in her late teens, was drinking heavily (‘alcohol was the companion who never judged me’) and suffering from a near phobia of social situations. Why? She can’t pinpoint that, but the divorce of her parents when she was ten was a major turning point in her life. For a while in her later teens, her relationship with her father – her rock now, it seems – was ‘fractured’. Growing up in Essex with her older brother, she says her teens were a confusing, distressing time. At school, she writes, she presented as one of the popular girls, but would take herself off to the toilets to cry. ‘I felt I had such a part to play, such an image to uphold – being the bubbly, happy, popular girl,’ she writes. ‘I’d sob my heart out on the cold, tiled floor and then... flip the Olivia switch back to “on”.’ A relationship in her late teens – where she was cheated on – reduced her confidence levels to zero. The early sections of her book smack of self-hate. She admits, for the first time, that the sobbing in the toilet cubicle at school spiralled into self-harm. ‘I cut myself to feel something,’ she writes. ‘Harming myself gave me a sense of release.’ She sees it now as a cry for help, because she would often do it ‘in places where it could be seen’. ‘It was like holding up a big “Ask me if I’m OK!” sign.’ Her mum once saw a wound on her hand and asked what it was. ‘I told her it was a cat scratch, and I don’t know if she believed me or if she didn’t want to have a deeper conversation about it.’ The self-harming did not end when she became an adult. Until very recently – and even since she became a mum – it has been a coping mechanism for her. Then there was her disordered eating. She was unable to eat in public, terrified people would judge how much she had on her plate. Buffets held a particular terror. She laughs gently at her younger self. ‘God, I’m strange,’ she says at one point, trying to explain it all. ‘I never understood it was anxiety.’ Reading all this, you would conclude that she was exactly the sort of young woman who should never have been allowed near a reality TV show. When she applied (keeping the darker aspects a secret from the producers, she admits), she was unhappy in a sales job, convinced she was ‘unloveable’. In a drunken rage, she’d kicked a hole in a pub toilet door and feared she might lose her job. Love Island could have destroyed Olivia completely, given how easy it is for young women to portray one outward image, while masking deep anguish. But she says it was the making of her Then she saw an advert for Love Island, which offered… well, an escape. ‘I was at rock bottom,’ she writes. ‘In my mind I had nothing left to lose.’ At the time her mum fretted about how she was going to afford her rent if she put her job on hold to go on reality TV (she can’t remember what she was paid by Love Island, but thinks it was ‘about £300’). It’s surely the case that Love Island could have destroyed her completely. When she chats away about how easy it is for young women to portray one outward image, masking deep anguish, one thinks of Sophie Gradon, her Love Island co-star, and Caroline Flack, the show’s presenter and one of Olivia’s role models. Both died by suicide; their inner pain only apparent after their deaths. She says she was devastated by Caroline’s death, but ‘can only speak of her own experience on Love Island’. She strongly feels that the show was the making of her. She calls it ‘exposure therapy’, explaining that suddenly being in the goldfish bowl – literally being judged by millions – forced her to deal with lots of her insecurities. Her eating for instance. Communal eating – her big terror – was simply a part and parcel of Love Island life. ‘I thought, “I’m in here now. If I don’t get over this, I’m going to be so hungry”,’ she tells me. She would ask the producers, or her fellow contestants, to put food on her plate because she simply couldn’t do it herself. ‘They must have thought I was a right princess.’ She would break off tiny bits of a bread roll and sneak them into her mouth, rather than ‘anyone see me eat’. She remembers feeling triumphant when she actually managed to help herself to some food. Obviously, meeting Alex, a former scaffolder, on the show was a life-changing experience, too. She suddenly realised she wasn’t unloveable: ‘He saw me for who I was.’ Love Island didn’t ‘cure’ her, though. She admits in the book that she self-harmed very soon after exiting the show. ‘After I came out of Love Island I started to burn myself on my hands with lighters,’ she writes. ‘I would be driving and have this urge.’ She doesn’t know why, but admits there was a ‘pressure to be a certain person. I’d always wanted to live up to the person I thought I should be.’ She finds it difficult to talk about this today, admitting that it’s because this ‘isn’t just something that happened in my past’. Self-harming ‘has come back at different points in my life, often when I’m going through periods of stress’. The last time, she admits, was after the birth of her son at a period ‘when Alex and I were struggling to connect. It felt like we’d lost our ability to talk to each other, to reach out when we needed it most.’ In her book she writes that Alex saw the cut on her arm and ‘was so angry and upset, angry he couldn’t help me’: ‘He was crying, repeating “Please don’t do that again”.’ Today, she insists those days are over. ‘It will be the last time that I do it. I was filled with such shame. I felt like an addict who’d had a relapse. It was disgusting.’ Since then she has had therapy and says: ‘I’ve become so much better at dealing with my anxiety. I think that’s why I wanted to do the book, to say to people that there are ways of dealing with this. It’s just hard to talk about, because there is such shame attached to it, but the way of dealing with the shame is to talk.’ Has another coping mechanism perhaps been to distance herself from some of the aspects of Love Island that could lead to lasting trauma? She chooses not to overanalyse how it felt to have millions watching you fall in love, knowing that you’ve had sex. ‘That wasn’t me,’ she says, half laughing, half mortified. ‘That was 22-year-old Liv.’ How does it feel to watch those bits back? ‘I never have! I’ve watched parts of the show, but never the more raunchy parts.’ Even at the time she says her family ‘cringed’. ‘I do remember my dad’s girlfriend Kelly warning him that there would be parts he wouldn’t want to see. When it looked like they were coming up, she’d say “tea time”, and he’d go and make a cuppa.’ What she is grateful for now is that her parents were ‘fully supportive, as I hope I’d be. If my kids wanted to go on a show like Love Island, I hope I could talk openly about it and say, “Yeah, your mum is cringing about it now, but it was a different time”.’ You wouldn’t encourage them away from reality TV? ‘I guess I’m going to have to deal with that when it comes, but no. Look at where I am because of it.’ Her Love Island story does appear to have come full circle, in a sense. Olivia and Alex recently bought their very own Love Island villa in Spain – something she says she could only have dreamed of before. And how could she have regrets, she says, when she has two healthy children and a husband who adores her? ‘I am not the sort of person who has regrets. Without sounding all airy-fairy, I believe in the Butterfly Effect – whatever happens affects the direction of your life, and you can’t change it.’ The plaque in her daughter’s bedroom represents a version of this, of course. ‘I’ve gone through bad things in my life, but sometimes you have to experience the bad to appreciate the good.’ No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. 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