THREE LESSONS “INSECURE” TAUGHT ME ABOUT FEMALE FRIENDSHIPS

Issa Rae’s Insecure premiered on HBO in October 2016 and stole the hearts of many viewers. At its center are Issa and Molly, best friends who’ve grown up together and somehow ended up approaching adulthood from completely different directions. Their relationship is the kind of ride-or-die friendship that can, and does, have it’s messy moments. Add in Kelli and Tiffany, friends from their college days, and you have something like Sex and the City for the young, gifted, and Black.

The show regularly showcases the ups and downs of dating and marriage, sex and situationships, conscious uncouplings. But while the romantic relationships gave us plenty to argue about, some of Insecure’s most useful lessons came from watching its women navigate each other.

Across five seasons, Insecure gets into the parts of friendship that don’t fit neatly on a Galentine’s Day card: when being honest with your friend crosses into judging her, how knowing someone for years can convince you you have a crystal ball of their every move, and what happens when two people who still have love for each other realize their friendship isn’t working anymore.

So, nearly five years after Insecure said goodbye, I’m revisiting some of the moments that made me look at my own friendships a little differently and the lessons I’m still taking from them.

Hella Perspective.

Sex and the City is probably still one of the first shows people think of when you say “female friendship.” Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha spent six seasons figuring out adulthood together at a time when the idea that marriage might not be the organizing principle of a woman’s entire life still felt somewhat radical on a mainstream show. Their opinions on sex, marriage, motherhood, and men were wildly different, but friendship gave them somewhere to bring all of those competing choices.

Across the bridge, Living Single gave us Khadijah, Synclaire, Maxine, and Regine, and a friendship that felt like home. They were young Black women making lives for themselves in ’90s Brooklyn, and their closeness had the ease of people who were already thoroughly embedded in one another’s daily lives. Friendship was community. It was where you landed after work, after a breakup, after making a terrible decision, or simply because you were bored and somebody else had food. Adulthood was something you built collectively.

Then Girls nearly dethroned Sex and the City as the go-to show about white womanhood and friendship, this time with an aggressively millennial perspective. Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna were coming of age in a world of extended adolescence, unstable careers, terrible apartments, blurred boundaries, and the increasingly rude realization that your 20s might not magically turn you into the person you assumed you’d be. Its version of friendship was messier, more self-involved, and incredibly appropriate for a generation that had been told our 20s were supposed to be one long journey of self-discovery.

But Black women hadn’t had a show centered on their friendships since Girlfriends ended in 2008.

Joan, Maya, Lynn, and Toni brought a different kind of intimacy to the friend-group show. They had years invested in one another, which meant their friendship had all the comfort of being deeply known and all the danger of being deeply known. And the group was constantly renegotiating what they owed one another as their lives changed.

Joan and Toni, especially, understood this. Their friendship had love and resentment baked into it in almost equal measure. They knew where the bodies were buried, metaphorically speaking, and probably have very different opinions about how the body ended up there in the first place.

When Girlfriends ended, that particular perspective disappeared from mainstream scripted shows for years.

Then Insecure brought it back.

Lowkey Thankful.

Watching Issa, Molly, Kelli, and Tiffany feels familiar. But familiarity is also what makes some of their worst moments sting. Insecure takes all the little things we accept as normal parts of friendship—the unsolicited advice, the assumptions, the things we forgive because “that’s just how she is”—and pushes them far enough that suddenly you’re looking at your own group chat a little differently.

Lesson One: Knowing Who Someone Has Been Doesn’t Mean Knowing Who They Are Now.

By season four, Issa and Molly have been best friends for years, but they’re starting to grow in different directions. Issa, who spent much of the early series unhappy at work and unsure about what exactly she wanted to do with her life, finally has some momentum. She’s organizing a neighborhood Block Party and beginning to trust herself professionally. Molly, meanwhile, is in a serious relationship and trying to break some of the dating patterns that’ve followed her for years.

Neither of them has completely caught up to the new version of the other.

Molly still sees Issa as the messy friend: impulsive, unreliable, and never too far from needing somebody to help clean up the latest disaster. Issa has her own fixed idea of Molly, especially when it comes to relationships. So when Molly starts questioning whether the man she’s dating can give her the emotional intimacy she wants, Issa assumes she knows exactly where this is headed: Molly has found another problem.

That tension eventually explodes around Issa’s Block Party, when Issa goes around Molly after Molly refuses to help her secure a new headliner. The favor is technically what they’re fighting about, but by then it’s carrying months of resentment on its back.

Long friendships give you a lot of information about someone. Sometimes too much.

And after enough years, it becomes very easy to confuse knowing who someone has been with knowing who she is now. Suddenly you’re arguing with the version of your friend you met years ago while a completely different woman is standing right in front of you. Sometimes the work of staying close is letting your friend surprise you.

Lesson Two: Standing Up for a Friend Doesn’t Mean Stepping Over a Line

Earlier in the series, Issa starts seeing a man who abruptly disappears from her life without explanation. Months later, he shows up at her apartment with flowers, hoping to talk. Molly answers the door first and sends him away before Issa even knows he was there.

And listen, I understand the impulse.

There’s a weird line in close friendships between looking out for someone and deciding you know what’s best for them. You know exactly how it went down. You sat through the crying. You probably sent several texts beginning with “I never liked him anyway.” So when the person responsible for all of that shows back up, of course bodyguard mode kicks in.

But being the friend who helped pick up the pieces doesn’t make you head of security.

Sometimes protecting your friend means giving her your opinion. Sometimes it means reminding her, lovingly and perhaps with screenshots, exactly how miserable she was the first time around. And sometimes it means standing back and letting her handle her own on her own. She grown.

Lesson Three: Just Because Your Friendship Doesn’t Look the Same Doesn’t Mean It’s Over

One of the quieter things Insecure understands is how dramatically adult friendship can change shape without anybody having done anything wrong.

By the later seasons, these women aren’t living the same lives they were when we met them. One becomes a mother. Careers get more serious. Relationships become marriages. Eventually, one friend moves across the country with her family, putting actual state lines between herself and the group.

The series finale jumps through several years of birthdays, weddings, moves, and other milestones, and the group looks a little different each time we see them. Their lives are fuller. Their schedules are more complicated. Their worlds don’t overlap as neatly anymore.

And yet, there they are.

What I took from that is that closeness doesn’t have to look exactly the way it did at 25 to still count. A friendship can survive new cities, new routines, marriages, babies, demanding careers, and whole new versions of the people inside it. Sometimes love looks less like being in somebody’s apartment every Thursday and more like knowing that when something big happens, she’s still one of the first people you want to tell.

And sometimes the proof is simply that you keep finding your way back to each other.

Growth, Okay?!

Watching Insecure peel back the layers of Molly and Issa’s friendship was often painful, occasionally infuriating, but always honest. And seeing two Black women at the center of a friendship sturdy enough to survive some truly ugly seasons—with a little help from wine and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos—hit particularly close to home for me.

The show reminded me that good friendships aren’t preserved in amber. They move.

A lot of friendships start because we see someone regularly: at school, at work, in the same neighborhood, in the same social circle. It’s easy to maintain a friendship when life keeps putting you in the same room. When that stops happening, staying close takes a little more effort. And sometimes the friendship doesn’t survive it.

But assuming that not seeing someone every day, every week, or even every month automatically means love has been lost is, for lack of a better phrase, a little dramatic.

Being able to meet people where (and when) they are is a skill. And for a friendship to survive changing seasons, changing zip codes, and changing marital statuses, it’s one worth learning.