Sex and the City: What Does Being Team Big Say About My Taste In Men?

Of all the great cultural debates in our time, few rival that of Big versus Aidan. It’s ketchup versus mayo. A blue dress versus a gold one. Jack versus that damn door.

Even if you’re not familiar with Sex and the City and the two great loves of its heroine, Carrie Bradshawchances are you’ve heard of them. Perhaps you’ll be familiar with Aidan’s turquoise rings, his cabin in the countryside, or the moment he asked Carrie to rub his belly after he’d eaten too much fried chicken. If you’re a Big supporter, you might recall his city-slicker overcoats, that garish red wall in his bedroom, or the way he purred, “Get in, Kid,” from inside his car on Carrie’s 35th birthday.

Deciding whether you’re on Team Aidan or Team Big is an integral part of the Sex and the City fan experience. But it’s also so much more than that. Because whichever way you go will tell you a lot about yourself. It might explain some of your romantic choices. Your attachment style. And how traumatized you are by your childhood. Or maybe that’s just me.

As a journalist and author who writes about relationships, has a sex column, and spends a significant amount of money on shoes against her better judgment, I have been told that my life looks a little like Carrie’s. Given the number of times that character has been ruthlessly assassinated over the years (the tag “Carrie Bradshaw worst” has more than 993 million views on TikTok), I’m not sure that’s a compliment. What I do know is that we are both writers and only one of us can afford to rent a studio flat in Manhattan filled with pairs of Manolo Blahniks.

Sex writing and shoe shopping aside, if there’s anything I’ve got in common with TV’s most polarising columnist, it’s that, in the end, she chooses Big. Because after years of watching the show and its subsequent films religiously, that’s the choice I always made too.

For a long time I flew my Team Big flag with pride. Sure, he wasn’t always perfect. But he came to her rescue in Paris! He was her soulmate! Her person! Her lobster! And so on. Now, though, looking back on decisions I’ve made in my own love life, I feel like I might have made the wrong choice.

Let’s go back a little. Like I said, the Big versus Aidan debate is about much more than one man versus the other. They represent two archetypes of heterosexual masculinity. On one side, we have the brooding, arrogant and emotionally mercurial type that loves a romantic gesture but will also hide your existence from his mother and tell you off for embarrassing him at parties (Big). On the other, we have the sensitive, thoughtful, and consistently kind type that will shower you with love, revamp your entire apartment for fun, and take your friends to the hospital when you can’t make it (Aidan).

In other words, one of them is going to make you feel like you constantly need to prove your worth, and the other is going to make you wonder why you ever questioned it. The choice, therefore, is not just Big or Aidan. It’s anxiety or security. Uncertainty or reassurance. Danger or safety. Why, oh why, then, would anyone choose the former over the latter?

Well, this is where things get interesting. Ask anyone who’s studied attachment theory—or been on TikTok recently—and they will tell you there are certain types of people that are more likely to be drawn to unstable relationships than others. Perhaps they came from a broken home or experienced some sort of abandonment or loss in their childhood. Whatever it was, it has left them with some sort of emotional void. The kind that can only be filled by someone else and subsequently puts them in a perpetual state of outsourcing their self-worth and chasing after partners that hurt them because that’s what they think they deserve.

Hello, I’ve been to therapy.

Without getting too pseudo-analytical about fictional characters, this seems sort of like the dynamic between Carrie and Big. Because no matter how many times he let her down, she kept clinging to the idea that he was her “great love” despite the fact that he was objectively a pretty awful boyfriend and person. After all, this is a man who decided to move to Paris without consulting his girlfriend. A man who insisted he never wanted to get married and then married someone almost half his age. A man who cheated on his wife in their marital home. And let’s not forget how he left Carrie at the altar….

Big’s crimes were as numerous as they were brazen. Particularly when you compare them to Aidan’s, whose only sins were wearing those turquoise rings and loving Carrie more than she could comfortably accept. I should add that, given the scope of SATC’s fanbase, there are fans who staunchly believe the opposite, and would argue that Aidan was the true villain of the series. But that’s another article entirely.

My point is that, by being on Team Big, I tolerated behavior just like his in my own love life. Beyond that, I romanticized it. In my early 20s, I longed for a relationship like Carrie and Big’s. One that was furiously passionate, mercurial, and melodramatic. Emotionally unavailable men became my kryptonite—and if they weren’t giving me what I wanted, the onus was on me to do whatever I could to show them I was worth it.

There was something seductive about the push-pull dynamic—addictive, even. Because the more someone pulled away, the harder I had to fight for their attention, which made it all the more rewarding when I got it. Like I’d won some sort of perverse competition.

I was intoxicated by the thrill of the chase, viewing bad behavior as a hurdle I needed to overcome because it would make the relationship mean more when I did. But as I’ve learned now, chasing the Bigs of this world off-screen is only ever going to end in tears. And there’s nothing romantic or exciting about that. It’s mostly just unpleasant.

To be clear, Sex and the City is far from the only TV series to fetishize a toxic relationship—see also: Gossip Girl’s Chuck and Blair, Gilmore Girls’ Rory and Dean, Glee’s Kurt and Blaine. And it’s not hard to see why: Healthy relationships make for boring television. But in real life, boring is probably what all of us should be striving towards. And as for those of us with emotional voids, well, we have to learn to fill them ourselves.

All this is just one of the reasons why I’m pleased Big is no longer a part of theSex and the Citymultiverse—spoiler alert: They killed him off in the first episode of theAnd Just Like That… reboot. Oh, and did I mention who’s returning in season two? Surely we’ve all seen those viral clips of Sarah Jessica Parker and John Corbett snogging on the streets of Manhattan during filming…

With this in mind, it seems that Carrie was never meant to end up with Big after all. And now that Aidan is back on the scene, there’s a chance something better could be waiting for her. Maybe there’s something better waiting for me, too.

This article originally appeared in British Vogue.