With Sex and The City bound for a return to TV, we consider the age-old conundrum of Carrie’s romantic choices
Humanity’s future beyond earth. What is dark matter. When is my package arriving. Big or Aidan. These are some of the most pressing questions of our time, but none more so than the latter.
Sex and The City (SATC) will have the issue top of mind for its fans and armchair pop culture philosophers alike as its revival series, And Just Like That…, is set to be released in December. With leaked press photos picturing Sarah Jessica Parker and Chris Noth parading around Paris as Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big respectively, viewers will be left debating one of the more salient points from the famous show—whether Carrie erred in dropping Aidan in favour of Big.
To frame the issue for those unaware: Carrie Bradshaw is a fashion-obsessed writer who has a sex column in the fictional New York Star. She worships at the altar of Manolo Blahnik from her rent-controlled apartment in the West Village and has as many shoes as she does salacious opinions on her friends’ dating follies. As much as she seems able to advise her friends and rapt readership in matters of love, that same assuredness is absent in her own romantic dalliances.
Of her smattering of partners that we’re introduced to, Mr. Big and Aidan are the most important. Mr. Big, or Big for short, is a financier with a healthy wit and perhaps the most emotionally unavailable man to ever step foot on the island of Manhattan. He has a nice apartment, a high opinion of himself, charisma, no shortage of pinstripe suits, and a gold Rolex Day-Date. Big and Carrie enjoy an on-again off-again relationship before eventually tying the knot. Carrie is constantly hand-wringing over him, whether they’re together or not.
On the flipside, Aidan is a more salt of the earth character than Big in his lofty office tower. Played by John Corbett, Aidan is a furniture designer with no Rollie, but a heart of gold. Where Big is flippant and aloof, Aidan is sensitive and present, if maybe too keen to identify as some sort of nice-guy partner. Aidan and Carrie enjoy two spells together, with Carrie smashing his heart to smithereens on both occasions. They break up the first time on account of Carrie cheating on him with Big, and the second after Carrie is unable to commit despite accepting his proposal and moving in together. There is an equal amount of hand-wringing here, but mostly because Carrie probably feels like she is settling with Aidan—things seem altogether too easy.
Neither man is all that great upon closer inspection. Big, while possessing charm in spades, is not fit for domestic life, or at least the kind of blissful married one that Carrie envisions—he is simply too used to his bachelor life to be a conscientious partner when living under the same roof. On his part, Aidan is just too different from Carrie: where she favours Valentino, he favours tacky surfer-bro turquoise jewelry; where she might don a Christian Dior dress and enjoy a night of revelry on the town, he’d rather slip into a well-worn pair of jeans and head upstate for a weekend of quiet at his dumpy property. That’s not to mention his nagging insecurity and desire to mould Carrie into some ideal partner that he has in mind by asking her to eschew smoking while making no sacrifices of his own.
In the end, both men had chauvinistic impulses of their own and how much they consciously identified with them was the differentiating factor. While Carrie feared she was settling with Aidan (she was), there’s also an argument to be made that she settled with Big, a man who might have his finger on the pulse of the economy, but not on his emotions. We’ll see if her heart is fought over in the reboot, but here’s to hoping she picks up her Fendi baguette bag and finds someone more suited to her.