Miranda Gives Voice to One of the Most 21st Century Dating Problems in Season 2 of And Just Like That

It’s a truth universally acknowledged: And Just Like That is not a show known for having a good grasp on reality. From Carrie’s puzzling foray into the world of podcasts to Che Diaz’s comedy career, the series, like its predecessor Sex and the City, is a dizzying melange of escapism, absurdism, and did-that-really-just-happen-ism. And yet in its Season 2 return with two new episodes this week, And Just Like That may have given us the most relatable storyline of the series: the all-too-real predicament of losing your phone when you don’t have your significant other’s number memorized.

For Miranda, this nightmare becomes a reality in episode 2 of the new season. Having turned down a prestigious internship to follow her newfound lover, the nonbinary icon Che Diaz, to California for the summer, everyone’s favorite red-headed lawyer is now funemployed and turns to volunteering to fill her days. Calamity strikes after she ventures out on a beach cleaning trip, only to lose her cell phone in piles of seaweed. While a lost cell phone doesn’t have to mean a catastrophe for Miranda (this is, after all, the age of iCloud), it’s a perfect storm of disaster—not only does she not know what beach she’s at and where it is in relation to where she’s staying, the only person she really knows in California is Che—and she has no idea what their number is. To top it off, time is of the essence—the couple is supposed to have dinner with Tony Danza, Che’s potential co-star for their sitcom pilot, which means that Miranda has little to no time to log into another device to try and retrieve her contacts.

In the age of smartphones, Miranda’s plight is all too relatable—according to a 2015 report by the Kaspersky Lab, not knowing phone numbers by memory is a part of a phenomenon they term “digital amnesia,” where people forget information that a digital device stores and remembers for them; the study found that 91% of consumers “can easily admit their dependency on the Internet and devices as a tool for remembering and an extension of their brain.” While the course of true love’s path never did run smooth, with the additional complexities of things like digital amnesia, we couldn’t help but wonder what this means for modern love?

Thankfully for Miranda, while she may not have known Che’s number by memory, she definitely knew her best friend Carrie’s number by heart. After borrowing a stranger’s phone to call Carrie, Miranda finally gets in touch with Che, who can’t pick her up from the beach (because they’re having dinner with Tony Danza) but sends a ride for her back to the house. Sure, the driver of that ride happens to be Che’s ex, to whom Che happens to still be married. But if nothing else, the happy(ish) ending makes a case for the old SATC adage that despite the shortcomings of significant others, you can always count your oldest girlfriends to be your soulmates.