Raj & Issabella's Romance Was Big Bang Theory's Biggest Missed Opportunity

Throughout The Big Bang Theory, Raj was portrayed as having the most frustrating love life among all the characters due to his shyness and inability to speak around women.

Yet, he somehow managed to date more women than anyone else.

Raj had close to twenty romantic relationships of varying lengths and depths, but only a few were significantly relevant to the plot. Typically, he dated someone, and then the relationship ended in a quick break-up, sometimes without any explanation.

By the end of TBBT, he was the only main character left single among the couples.

It's unfortunate because some of those relationships could have enriched the series if they had been properly developed. For instance, consider his brief fling with Issabella, a beautiful Cuban-American janitor who worked at Raj's telescope building at the university (they met in Season 10). Raj actively courted her, and their relationship seemed to be working out just fine.

Then Issabella discovered that Raj lied to his friends about her real profession, claiming he was dating an astronomer. Angry that Raj was embarrassed by who she was, she left, but Raj managed to apologise by listing various embarrassing things about himself, and she appeared to accept his apology.

But the relationship still ended up as one of the aforementioned break-ups, casually mentioned in later episodes with no real explanation provided. It's a shame because Raj finally had a chance to mature and grow as a character as the show approached its conclusion.

For once, he was genuinely interested in someone, not just because they were interested in him. And then this opportunity was simply discarded.

This is doubly unfortunate because Raj, in general, was a huge missed opportunity in the concluding seasons of TBBT. The showrunners couldn't be bothered to do anything meaningful with his character in terms of relationships, except perhaps using him as a perennial bad example.

So, as was the case with Issabella, even when Raj seemed to correct his mistakes and start something serious, the relationship still went nowhere.