they can never make me hate you carrie bradshaw

Somewhere between a scroll and a pause, I came across an Instagram reel suggesting that if you’re between 32 and 39, you’re essentially living season one of Sex and the City. It was clearly meant as a metaphor, but I couldn't help but wonder... how much of it actually maps onto real life.

Because at the end of the day, it’s just a TV show. Not a blueprint for how life is supposed to unfold. It was never meant to be. The storylines are heightened, curated, and built for drama, not instruction. Still, the instinct to compare isn’t really about plot points. It’s about emotional resonance, the way certain stories mirror familiar patterns of uncertainty, growth, and self-discovery in ways that feel uncomfortably close to home.

In that sense, I’ve found myself thinking I might be operating at Carrie Bradshaw levels of insane—at least when it comes to relationships. Carrie has long been criticized for being impulsive, emotionally inconsistent, and at times frustratingly self-centered. And honestly, some of that critique is fair. She isn’t always a great partner, and she doesn’t always show up as the best friend.

But reducing her to those flaws flattens what makes her interesting in the first place.

Carrie was never written to be aspirational in the traditional sense. She isn’t the polished, perfectly self-aware protagonist who consistently makes the right choices. Her messiness isn’t a flaw in the writing. It’s the point. It’s what makes her feel less like a character and more like someone you might actually recognize, if not in your life, then in yourself.

There’s also something telling about the way she’s often judged. While all four women in Sex and the City make questionable decisions and navigate their own emotional blind spots, Carrie is the one who gets singled out most often, as if her imperfections demand a stronger reaction. It becomes easy to reduce her to her worst moments instead of holding space for her complexity.

But maybe that reaction says more about us than it does about her.

Because Carrie reflects a kind of contradiction that most people don’t like to sit with. Not everything in life moves in sync. Careers can be stable while relationships falter. Confidence can coexist with deep uncertainty. Growth is rarely linear, and self-awareness doesn’t always arrive in time to save us from our own choices. Carrie exists in that imbalance, and that’s exactly why she feels so familiar.

It’s also why she’s such an easy target. It’s simpler to critique her decisions than to admit how recognizable some of them feel. Easier to position ourselves above her than to acknowledge the moments where we’ve done the same thing, felt the same pull, made the same kind of mistake.

And that’s where the discomfort really sits.

Because Sex and the City was never offering perfect role models. It was offering reflections—sometimes exaggerated, sometimes frustrating, but still recognizably human. Carrie Bradshaw isn’t meant to be measured against who we think we should be. She’s closer to a reminder of who we already are when things are messy, uncertain, and unresolved.

Maybe that’s the part people are most uncomfortable with. Not that she gets it wrong, but that she gets it wrong in ways that feel familiar. And familiarity, especially in our flaws, is rarely comfortable.

Still, there’s something honest in that discomfort. If a character can unsettle us not because she’s aspirational, but because she feels a little too real, then maybe the story is doing exactly what it was supposed to do all along.

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