<em>Insecure</em>’s Nuanced Take on Singleness
This post contains light spoilers through Season 2, Episode 1 of Insecure.
Issa and Lawrence are sitting across from each other in a dimly lit restaurant. “You know, I get why you did what you did now,” he tells her. Issa nods. “And it hurts,” Lawrence continues. “But hopefully we can move past it.”
Issa smiles. It’s exactly, it seems, what she’d been wanting to hear. And then: “What?” she says.
“I said, are you originally from here?”
With that, Issa (Issa Rae) snaps out of her reverie. She is not, it turns out, sharing a romantic meal with Lawrence (Jay Ellis), the ex-boyfriend she cheated on, and the ex-boyfriend who is still sort of in her life, and the ex-boyfriend she still, sitting at that table with a total stranger: a guy she met through Tinder (or maybe Hinge, or maybe Bumble, or maybe one of the other services that has transformed Issa’s phone into a buzzing catalog of suitors who are at once omnipresent and extremely far away). This particular guy is anonymous, to the viewer. And he will remain that way. The real point of the scene is not who he is, but who he is not.
