14 Days of Swooon
Is Big or Aidan Better for Carrie? Love Expert Weighs In On ‘Sex and the City’ Triangle
Sex and the City has reentered the chat, and online conversations have sparked fresh debates on the topics of love and dating (like is everyone in New York still actually a freak?) and resurfaced iconically cringey moments from the show that still haunt us to this day. (Bonjour! Sorry, jump scare.)
Like our favorite flawed protagonists, we still have so many questions about what it means to date healthily and find the one. Or what to do when you self-sabotage and cheat on the one with your toxic ex. Or how to best hit your soon-to-be husband with a white-rose bouquet to create the biggest scene possible… We decided it would be best to call an expert to answer our questions and more.
With a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Developmental Psychology, as well as a 10-year professorial run at New York University, Dr. Zhana Vrangalova is a real-life love expert. Hence, we can say with confidence that her opinion on Carrie Bradshaw’s relationships is the most informed, expert opinion we could find to answer the question: Mr. Big or Aidan Shaw? According to her website, Dr. Zhana has offered “sex and relationship consulting for individuals, couples, and larger relational units” for 15 years. For 10 years, she’s taught Human Sexuality at NYU.
In an exclusive interview with Swooon for our new Love Lessons series, Dr. Zhana explained why Mr. Big got cold feet on his wedding day, her reaction to Carrie and Aidan’s reconciliation on And Just Like That, and more as she analyzed Carrie, Mr. Big, and Aidan’s worst and best moments throughout the timeline of their relationships.
“It’s really fascinating to me that a show that came out 30 years ago is still relevant,” said Dr. Zhana. “Some of the same issues that these women are discussing and obsessing over and are trying to figure out…we’re still dealing with the same stuff.”
Stonewalling and defensiveness take the front seat of what Dr. Zhana described as a very “emblematic” scene of their relationship: the French fry fight between Carrie and Mr. Big when he tells her he has to move to Paris for work. Despite Carrie’s openness to moving to Paris for the sake of their relationship, Big only meets her with half-hearted enthusiasm for both her presence as well as their relationship as a whole.
“On one hand, there’s this really strong connection that binds them together, but at the same time, Big is not fully available,” she said. “Even though he keeps coming back, you can feel how he has one foot in and one foot out. There’s that strong independent streak in him. He has his walls up in many ways.” She continued, “There’s a lack of commitment and willingness to give Carrie a little more security and safety in what this relationship can be and will be going forward.”
Fast forward to Big’s engagement with the new woman in his life Natasha, and Carrie’s attempt at “friendship” with her then-ex who’s back in New York, leaving much to be said about the age-old question: Can you still be friends with your ex?
“We certainly can be friends with exes, but it depends,” started Dr. Zhana. “In this particular case, one of the parties doesn’t want to be just friends. So she tries to create this friendship when she’s not really ready for it, and she wades into territory that she’s really not ready to hear about.” (Carrie promptly storms out of restaurant, tripping down stairs, and bumping into waiters on her way out.)
“It’s not surprising, her very big reaction, but it was certainly avoidable,” she continued. “And it’s a big lesson to not ask questions you’re not ready to hear the answer to.”
As for Carrie’s reasoning as to why Big chose Natasha and not her, Dr. Zhana asked the question we’ve all been asking for years: What’s so complicated about Carrie anyways?
“When we don’t know exactly what’s going on, we try to make sense of the situation,” said Dr. Zhana. “But we’re still left with a big question mark…We get so little insight on what Mr. Big thinks and why he’s doing the things he’s doing. It could be things about himself. It could be some fatalism in him about what he thinks he deserves and what he doesn’t deserve.”
“In the end, she walks away saying some women cannot be tamed, but she wants to be tamed by him in some ways,” Dr. Zhana pointed out. “It’s a rationalization of he has something you can’t have, and then you convince yourself you don’t even want it.” (We would recommend you read more about the sour grapes fable if you’re also the type of person to tell yourself non-truths to make sense of what is true.)
Speaking of things you don’t want: Carrie (spoiler alert) cheats on Aidan with Mr. Big. Not only does she cheat once, but she and Big see each other multiple times at multiple hotels across Manhattan during their affair. Unable to keep the secret from Aidan any longer, Carrie decides to finally tell him—the morning of Charlotte’s wedding they were set to attend together. After sitting out the ceremony to discern how he feels, Aidan returns to the church to tell Carrie it’s over. He even goes so far as to say he wish he never knew about her cheating to begin with, leaving a tearful Carrie alone at her best friend’s wedding, wondering what she could have done differently to salvage their relationship.
So, how can a couple healthily handle infidelity?
“These days we talk so much about non-monogamy, open relationships, polyamory, and negotiating these other romantic and sexual relationships we want to have, and we tend to value honesty and transparency,” said Dr. Zhana. “But there is a nonnegligible portion of the population who prefer not to have that out in the open, not to have all of those conversations. Because having a lot of these conversations out in the open, it’s a lot of work.”
She added, “Cheating with someone you were in a relationship with and that in an ideal scenario you would still be in a relationship with…to be faced with that on Aidan’s part is a lot. And it makes perfect sense that he’s choosing not to continue the relationship there.”
As far as iconic moments of the franchise go, Big’s cold feet on the day of his and Carrie’s wedding will go down as one of the biggest red flags of TV history. But Dr. Zhana was quick to point out it was actually Carrie who prevented the wedding from moving forward. “To not have any level of understanding that cold feet can happen, especially given who this person is, and that he’s back and he’s ready to do it, it’s a little unfortunate that the viewer has to deal with her mourning a relationship which we know is going to happen anyway,” laughed Dr. Zhana.
“She’s trying to make sense of it…It’s certainly a repeat of a pattern that she’s tapping into. But it also shows a level of lack of flexibility of how and why someone might feel that way that is not so uncommon,” she continued. “I would’ve loved to see that movie play out with her of course being mad and everything but then giving him the grace and understanding that that’s possible and then being happy that he’s back and going through with it as planned.”
As for the latest on Carrie’s love life, Dr. Zhana can’t quite endorse the feasibility of Carrie and Aidan’s revived relationship. After a psychedelic mushroom-related incident with his teenage son went awry while he was away from home, Aidan decides it’s in his sons’ best interests if he ends his relationship with Carrie until they both become independent adults. That means five years of waiting for Carrie—five years of waiting for someone in a period of life that she may not have the privilege of waiting for.
“Really? You’re gonna sacrifice five years of your lives at an age when people are getting older? I mean, her husband just died of a heart attack. Anything can happen. Five years is not nothing and just doesn’t feel very realistic or necessary. And what is this modeling? That this is the way to go about things? That it’s all or nothing? That you can either be a parent or be in a relationship? They clearly had something good going finally…and to throw it away like that? Why?”
In the end, Dr. Zhana conceded that in a way Carrie knew what was best for her all along. It was all a matter of timing.
“Mr. Big was the right choice for her when she was younger, and Aidan was the right choice for her now,” decided Dr. Zhana. Watch the video above to hear Dr. Zhana’s full thoughts on why Carrie made the right choices for herself.
