Anyone who watched Sex and the City as a fully grown woman can easily see that Carrie never should have—or would have—ended up with Big. In real life, it just doesn’t happen. The guy who jerks you around and avoids commitment definitely does marry a 25-year-old he’s known for a few months, but he definitely doesn’t then, post-divorce, follow you to Paris to rescue you from the other rich-yet-vaguely abusive guy you’re dating. No. He might marry another 25-year-old he’s known for five minutes, but he’s not going to marry you. Sorry to be harsh, but if there’s anything we’ve learned from years (and years and years) of dating, it’s that Mr. Big is a loser. He does not end up with you, and eventually you realize you dodged a very big (pun intended) bullet by not getting the forever after you thought you wanted with him.
Now that we’ve gotten that rant off of our chests, we’d like to point out that even Sex and the City‘s author, Candace Bushnell, agrees that Carrie and Big would not end up together in real life. In a new interview with The Guardian , Candace says, “Well, I think, in real life, Carrie and Big wouldn’t have ended up together. But at that point the TV show had become so big. Viewers got so invested in the storyline of Carrie and Big that it became a bit like Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett. They had become an iconic couple and women really related to it; they would say ‘I found my Mr. Big’ or ‘I just broke up with my Mr. Big.’ It became part of the lexicon. And when people are making a TV show, it’s show business, not show art, so at that point it was for the audience.”
We get it, and at the time the show was running, we wanted Big and Carrie to be together, too. Rewatching it nearly 20 years later, however, is a different story. Sure, she wouldn’t have ended up with Aidan because, you know, he liked her too much. If our own lives are any indication, we’d say the most realistic candidate for long-term success with Carrie was Berger, mostly because he reminds us of the kinds of guys still out there trying to date at a certain age—immature, insecure and probably broke. On that note, Candace also mentioned to The Guardian how sad modern-day dating app culture is to her. “When I talk to girls in their early 20s some say, ‘What’s a date like?’ Twenty years ago, you had to go on dates. But Tinder has pushed us up against a very harsh reality and I think younger people see themselves as commodities in the dating world. And I have to say, that never crossed our minds back then, the idea of having to make myself more attractive on my profile, this whole idea of marketing oneself.”
Ironic, given Candace’s SATC alter ego is arguably one of the most successfully marketed fictional characters of all time, isn’t it? Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ll be revisiting the quaint notion of a date via the episode in which Carrie goes out with a guy who sticks books down his pants for no reason—though we’ll probably mostly just feel nostalgic for people who read.
