Beau vs Buddies

by Liz Funk

Sex and the City illustrated many prominent issues that women sometimes encounter in their relationships: fertility struggles, unease about out-earning a boyfriend, being attracted to “toxic bachelors,” and wanting to pursue “sex like a man,” among others. While not every woman desires the unattached sex that Samantha pursues, Sex and the City—in particular, Sex and the City: The Movie—shined light on a phenomenon that nearly every woman deals with at one point or another: clashing with a friend’s love interest. On Sex and the City, Mr. Big continually treats Carrie like crap—never wanting to commit, marrying another woman yet expecting Carrie to happily continue as “the other woman,” and (spoiler alert!) eventually leaving Carrie at the altar at the Bradshaw-Preston wedding. But Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda are always there to clean up the mess Big made. Needless to say, the girlfriends develop a major grudge. Charlotte even confesses that she practiced what she would say if she bumped into Mr. Big on the street: “I curse the day you were born!”

However, Sex and the City is not always known for portraying reality, and this case is no exception. Like Carrie’s fabulous lifestyle magically afforded by a journalist’s salary and Samantha’s puzzling evasion of death by venereal disease, the image of Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha shrieking with delight when Carrie and Big are finally married isn’t realistic.

In real life, when the friends don’t get along with the boyfriend, things rarely resolve so neatly.

Says Allison, a twentysomething who lives in Manhattan, “I have over time disliked a friend’s choice of men many times… I felt like she often chose men who were selfish, destructive, patriarchal, and lacking depth. We often clashed because when her boyfriends would hurt her… I would get in full defense mode.” Unfortunately, even as Allison helped her friend through the hardships in her friend’s romances, their friendship fizzled because of her friend’s less-than-gallant boyfriends.

However, it’s a two-way street, and Allison reports that sometimes her friends aren’t so crazy about her boyfriends, either. “Friends have oftentimes disliked my boyfriends. And now with perspective I can say they rightfully did. I have been connected… with less than perfect characters in my past. I often didn’t see who these people really were as soon as my friends did because I was blinded by the glitter (that was really broken glass, so to speak).”