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OWN’s Love Is_, the story of Yasir and Nuri—loosely (hopefully, very loosely) based on the real-life relationship of the show’s creators Mara Brock Akil and Salim Akil—isn’t quite the romantic ode to marriage that many thought it would be. That’s largely because of the complicated nature of dissecting which narratives to trust, though they all seem to point at Yasir being a whole-ass trash bag of a person.
Much of Love Is_ revolves around Yasir’s struggle to reach his full potential as a man, a writer, a lover, a father, and a husband-to-be. Yasir has shown himself to be manipulative, making Nuri’s debut as a scriptwriter all about him, stealing her moment. He’s insecure about his finances and the state of his struggling career, so he projects his failures on the people around him. And he has clear anger issues, as indicated by his abusive interaction with the mother of his child, all in front of his own mother and new girlfriend. That showing of anger was the defining moment that Yasir is still struggling to recover from; it’s hard to get the absent, erupting father out of mind.
Love Is_ wants us to root for Yasir and Nuri, but doing that means thinking that Yasir is worthy of Nuri, and he simply hasn’t given us much to rally behind. I can’t think of any standout moments of positivity, and even his pickup lines are plagiarized from his own writing. There’s obviously a redemption story at the heart of Yasir’s quest to be the right man for Nuri, but even if the 1997 Yasir improves, I’m not sure I’ll believe he’s changed much because, his entire story—as told by the present-day Yasir—seems like utter BS.
The multiple storytelling perspectives—1990s Yasir and Nuri, present-day Yasir and Nuri who are on screen telling the stories from the ’90s, and the real-life input of Salim and Mara—are never wholly reliable, as each presents a challenge in understanding what really happened. How much of the story is a real-life retelling of Mara and Salim’s actual beginnings? How much of the story is a skewed perspective from the modern-day Yasir and Nuri telling their past stories to one another? And how much of the story is just lies told in real-time as we watch the young lovers figure out their lives? While the mystery is part of what makes Love Is_ compelling, it also invites the audience to investigate who to trust and whose stories to believe.
I find it hard to believe anything Yasir says.
When we first meet Yasir, he’s living with a woman named Ruby, playing out the final scenes in a relationship that is essentially over. She’s pressuring him to find a job and he’s miserable. There doesn’t appear to be any romantic love left between the two. But since I’m invited to investigate the truth, I can’t help but think that Yasir is lying about this relationship, and that Nuri is foolish to believe him. Let’s look at Yasir’s version of the story we’ve seen so far:
- He claims he is living with an “ex” with no romantic interaction.
- At the end of the first episode, Yasir is so enamored with Nuri that he refuses Ruby’s sexual advances and sets up his makeshift bed on the couch to sleep overnight (where he’d apparently been sleeping for months).
- He stands up Nuri to spend the night with Ruby and take of her because she had a surgical procedure and he couldn’t leave her side. When Nuri tracks him down, he not only refuses to explain what’s happening, but closes the door in her face.
- He spends Valentine’s Day with Ruby.
- He catches Ruby having sex with someone in her apartment and he decides to fight the man, not because of the sex, but because he was mad they wouldn’t let him in the room to look for his prayer rug.
Maybe I’m cynical (I am). But these stories all seem to indicate a man who juggled two women and has kept up a fictional narrative for decades. There is no way I believe his side of the story. I see it as a tale of a man who left his girlfriend for a woman he met in a coffee shop. And that reading of the story taints the way I view Yasir and his trials and tribulations throughout the rest of the season. How am I supposed to believe in the retribution of a man who can’t be honest about his life 20 years later?
Love Is_ wants us to root for the burgeoning couple to find their happiness together, but if I didn’t already know they ended up married, I’d be rooting for them to break up for the sake of Nuri’s well-being. I don’t want Yasir, with his insecure, faux-philosophical, borderline abusive hotep-y self, to be with anyone until he gets his life together. I just hope this doesn’t turn into another one of those tales of a woman bearing the brunt of turning a boy into a man, because that would be just another story of what love isn’t.
