The Way They Were

On Carrie, Big & Affairs to Remember

It was over between Carrie and Big before they cut the cake.

“I want someone who will be with me, until the end . . . of a wedding,” Carrie says, hanging her head, standing outside the reception hall at the Plaza Hotel. Big is her date, and he doesn’t care to stay until the bride tosses the bouquet.

“Okay,” Big says, reading her expression calmly with searching eyes. There’s a sense of forlorn acceptance to the way he replies, “I’ll stay.”

This, in retrospect, is the moment when he realizes that they, as Carrie put it, “don’t want the same things.” What Big wants: to have sex with the woman who makes him laugh, until he find someone he takes seriously and wants to be seen in public with. What Carrie wants: to have a key to his apartment and the promise of a future together, to fall asleep in his arms at night.

“Guys just say things like that,” my friend Petra said over coffee last week. We were perched on a bench in a café, warm afternoon light streaming in through the big windows. I was describing a run in with a person from the recent past, and the things that he said.

“They don’t mean anything by it. But we take it as meaning something, and think about it over and over,” she said, taking a sip of her tea. “They don’t think about it at all.”

I thought about this later, while re-watching Sex and the City. The specific type of heartbreak that comes from taking words of future dreams at face value. In reality, this is Carrie’s fallacy (and my own). The stories we tell ourselves often have little to do with the reality of the other person. Dreams and desires blur.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently, after going out for drinks with someone I matched with on a dating app. The conversation flowed easily and the time passed by quickly, but when I looked into his eyes I didn’t feel, as Frances describes in Conversations with Friends:

“A key turning hard inside my body, turning so forcefully that I could do nothing to stop it.”

“I don’t know,” I voice noted her, pacing around my apartment. “I just like, usually only want that feeling. But it’s rare.”

yeah i think you should maybe never let a man make you feel something that intensely

She replied

Bc it’s not real lol

Carrie is pursued by nice, normal guys who want to take her to dinner, but she always comes back to Big. She dates other people in a self-destructive cycle to get his attention, making false promises of her own without any real intention to commit.

This is a hard cycle to break, being addicted to the highs and lows of an idea of love that feels like it’s just out of reach — a dream relationship that’s “over there,” as Lana said, somewhere over the rainbow.

Chasing the high of this feeling warps Carrie’s sense of reality. As the show progresses, she grows increasingly strung out, her self worth dependent on her proximity to Big. When she’s close to him, platonic or otherwise, she grows smaller, more neurotic and insecure. When their lives are separate, her world expands — but in her mind, the rubber band of space and time snaps and contracts. All roads lead back to him.

As a Big girl myself (I know, I know), his appeal to her is difficult to put into words, because I just get it. The way he looks at her, how they make each other laugh. Chris Noth is sexy! Her allure to him seems simple — she’s his Marilyn. He doesn’t respect her, and that means his guard is down. They can really have fun, because he doesn’t have to pretend to be perfect with her.

In his minds eye, Big has a picture of his life that he relies on for a stable sense of self, one that Carrie doesn’t fit into. This picture isn’t what he actually wants, but what he thinks he should. He doesn’t really know what he wants (if I had to guess, I’d say it’s to be alone) but deep down, he knows that he’s not good enough for the Jackie that he thinks he should end up with. When he does marry his Jackie, a 25 year old model-esque Ralph Lauren executive he meets in Paris, he cheats on her with Carrie.

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In The Way We Were, Barbra Streisand’s Katie, with her frizzy hair and ferocious passion, falls in love with Robert Redford’s Hubbell, the all American boy who “was like the country he lived in — everything came too easily to him.”

Their relationship is steered by Katie, and it’s clear from the beginning that Hubbell isn’t cut out for the intensity of Katie’s love: for him, for life, for the causes she champions. For the ways that she cares so deeply and pushes him to be better.

They move to LA, and in her eyes he takes the easy way out, writing Hollywood movies instead of books. While pregnant with his baby, Katie goes to Washington to protest the Hollywood blacklist. She’s too political and she “wants too much,” Hubbell says.

“You'll never find anyone as good for you as I am, to believe in you as much as I do or love you as much!” Katie cries.

“I know that,” Hubbell replies, looking away from her face. He leaves her before she goes into labour.

The movie ends with a chance run in outside of the Plaza Hotel in New York. Katie, wild-eyed and grinning from ear to ear, stands before Hubbell, the golden boy in town from California, arm in arm with his new girl.

“He marries this simple girl, with shiny hair,” Miranda says in Sex and the City, describing the plot of the movie to the girls over brunch.

“I’m a Katie girl!” Carrie cries, pulling on her own curly hair as evidence.

At the end of Carrie and Big’s story (or, rather, when it should have ended, before their affair), she spies him and his fiancé outside the Plaza. The man who said he never wanted to get married again is engaged to the “simple girl with shiny hair.”

He tucks his fiancé into the back of a town car and sidles up to Carrie across the cobblestone street.

“Well, you’re late. The party’s over,” he says, looking down at her with a grin.

“I’ll say it is,” she replies, like she’s in on the joke. He laughs.

His fiancé steals a glance at them out the car window, quickly turning her gaze away as Carrie places a hand on his cheek.

“Your girl is lovely, Hubbell,” she says, searching his eyes for a sense of understanding.

The space between his eyebrows crinkles. “I don’t get it,” he replies.

It’s a moment that makes me cringe, for its relatability. Thinking that your life is a movie, and this is the story of a Great Love, when the truth of this sort of relationship is far more predictable and undesirable than Carrie or Katie or myself would like to believe.

When I ran into the person from the last story I wanted to believe in, he ended up walking me home. We talked in stride for blocks like old friends, falling into a familiar, easy rhythm.

“[One day], I’ll just show up at your door,” he said, after giving me a hug goodbye.

“Dear God I hope not,” I called over my shoulder as I walked away. He laughed behind me.