To say Issa ending up with Lawrence was a controversial choice would be like saying the men she hooked up with were kind of cute: an egregious understatement. It’s understandable if Lawrence winning out as Issa’s concluding romantic mate in the finale of Insecure elicited strongly ambivalent reactions from the show’s audience. Lawrence was a shitty boyfriend and his lack of effort drove Issa to being a shitty girlfriend, cheating on him just to feel a jolt of desirability. In Season 1, it was clear that they had outgrown each other to the point of being toxic, and could no longer grow either individually or as a couple. Lawrence and Issa’s naysayers might argue that they grew apart because they were supposed to grow apart—and stay apart. That perhaps their post-breakup(s) evolution as individuals happened separately because that is how it was supposed to be. That actually, what she had with Nathan was more promising, or that maybe (maybe) she could have hooked up with Crenshawn just once (yes, an unprofessional curveball, but perhaps worth it to see Kofi Siriboe topless)?
But what if the show’s point is that there is no supposed-to-be? Lawrence and Issa’s romantic path was chaotic, littered with hurdles and dips and twists: and through it all, they stayed on each other’s minds. Insecure was one of the messiest love stories of recent times. Perhaps this is why it was also one of the best.
Issa Dee’s journey of self-discovery paused at a number of preternaturally beautiful romantic interests, but Lawrence is the one who persistently resurfaced. Tall, fine, annoying Lawrence, Lawrence who laughs at Issa’s corny jokes, Lawrence who turned into a fuckboi at one point, Lawrence who had a child with another woman, Lawrence who Issa just can’t seem to emotionally shake, and Lawrence who often elicited a chorus of cusses from women who believed that our girl deserved better. However, by Season 5, Lawrence is not the same person we were first introduced to. He and Issa have grown together and apart, further and closer at intervals, discovering their individual purposes within the slipping and the snagging and the soaring in their journeys, and still stitching back to each other, finding each other in the tangles of their lives, with the baggage of infidelity, split parenthood, betrayals and emotional reckoning.
Issa Rae herself admitted that it took her time to see that Issa and Lawrence could be right, and perhaps that is the point of this particular love story: that the rightness wasn’t anything that could be discerned objectively, but something intrinsic, personal, instinctual. Issa Dee chose Lawrence within the mess, despite the mess, because of the mess. The mess was growing pains that got them where they needed to be, a vehicle that honed them into their full personhoods. Issa’s fantasy of domestic bliss with Lawrence from season 2—picturing the two of them, in love, with a child—was broken down and reconstituted with life’s unpredictability and harsh edges folded in for their last scene together. In the end it was Issa and Lawrence together as part of a blended family with the child he had with another woman. Love was still present and pulsing, but in a new form: a dreamy ending grounded with the messiness of reality. The show addressed the emotional fractures and contradictions in life, and the most compelling romances to watch tend to have jagged edges.
That theme was recapitulated in a higher register in the arguable true love story of the show: Issa and Molly. Molly and Issa’s friendship—*sisterhood—*was the heartbeat of Insecure, a dynamic that propelled and galvanized and broke hearts. These two women knew each other, saw each other, and held each other, not just a representation of Black female friendship, but an exploration, and unflinching excavation of the bonds that hold us down. Season 4 was arguably the most difficult for Insecure fans, as we watched the two women we loved like they were our girls growing apart, not communicating the little hurts and allowing them to become gaping wounds, lacerating each other with harsh truths only someone you love can say. Their patter and their warmth, the way they were able to draw out the best parts of each other, was missed, but perhaps this schism was also necessary. To truly understand the depth of their love we had to see it tested and stretched so thin, we wondered if it would snap. They were messy with each other in a way one can only be with someone who knows your rawest self, knows you so well that flesh and bone is exposed, vulnerable to wounding. The tension was a darkness that made their friendship brighter upon reunion, as breaths we didn’t know we were holding released in relief.
The characters of Issa and Molly sang when they were in each other’s lives, their chemistry making the best parts of them shine brighter, illuminating harsh truths for each other. Even when Issa’s romantic life was in chaos, we were never truly confused about the fact that Molly and Issa belonged together as life partners, as a team. In their devastating last scene together, after Molly’s sweetly satisfying happy-ending-wedding with her romantic equal, enemy-to-lover Taurean, Molly said to Issa, through tears so tender that it was near impossible to view without bawling, “Thank you so much for everything, Issa. For being you, for loving me while I was me. And girl, I don’t know where life is gonna take us, but I just know that as long as you’re around, I’ma be OK.” “Yeah,” Issa replied, her own voice tight with emotion, eyes glistening, “Me too.”
It was the essence of their love story—the love story. That they loved each other’s essences, that they loved each other so much that they worked to reconcile their differences, that the skin of their friendship was so much stronger where it had healed after the split, reinforced with the knowledge that they didn’t want to do life without each other. Issa’s journey to self-knowledge, security in her skin, confidence in her path and her vision was lit up by the love of her friends, making the mess navigable—and when the friendship was the mess itself, the love made the friendship navigable.
This speaks to the relationship between Insecure and its audience. Even when storylines were controversial or considered frustrating, the show’s community hung in there, stuck with it, saw its heart, because they knew how much Insecure—and Issa Rae, the undeniable force and voice behind the show—loved its people, and trusted its intention to show Black people in all their glory and mess and humanity, their tragedy and their humor, their beauty. We saw each other in these characters, and it was more than seeing dark-skinned Black women desiring and being desired, failing and flying. It was that all the characters seemed not just a reflection, but real. Messy. They were more than a representation: A realization of known people, people who we could use as tools to know ourselves, to ask what we would do if we were in that situation, to reflect on what we love about ourselves. Insecure itself was a friend, and its–yes, messy–relationship with its audience was its own complex love story.
Insecure sits among a growing TV canon that explores Black female friendship. Among its legacy of sharp, bawdy phrases (“broken pussy”), fine men, and warm writing, sits a theme that entrenches it as a crucial work: hope within the mess. The artfully placed comma in “Everything Gonna Be, Okay?” makes the title of the finale a reassurance and a statement: that we are going to be alright, despite the darkness and the chaos. The final scene of Issa driving through the neighborhood she made it her mission to uplift underpins the notion that love–love of community, love of self, love of your people–makes everything okay, even when it is not okay, even when there is mess.
We don’t know if Lawrence and Issa will last, but perhaps that doesn’t matter. It’s not about having the right answer, but the boldness and the belief it takes to answer the question. Everything is going to be, because at its heart Insecure was about being, the mess within the mundanity of life and the comfort, the faith that we will persist to exist, okay? The question calls us to agree, to reinforce the assurance, to interact with that hope. That in itself is an expression of love.