Who Misses Sex and the City?

I admit this might be a blog post for chicks. I don’t care; I want to reminisce for a second. The Sex and the City movie was on the other night, and yes, I watched the whole thing. Yes, I cried on several occasions, and NO, it wasn’t because of the Cosmopolitans I drank while watching it. It was because on a visceral level, I miss those girls: Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda.

Women, remember back in the day when you used to think of yourself as one of them? In my group of gal pals, we had obvious personality traits that matched up to each of the characters. I was Carrie, of course: an overly emotional and irrational writer who drank and smoked and wore tiny dresses with high-heeled shoes. To protect the innocent, I won’t say who was Samantha in our group, but … you know who you are. We had a Charlotte and a Miranda, too, and even though time has passed, I think we still associate with those women. I know I’m still very much Carrie Bradshaw.

In college, on summer break, all my high school girlfriends and I would get together, lay on the carpeted floor of Emmy’s Rossford apartment, drink champagne, and watch episode after episode of Sex and the City. Janine and I would sneak out occasionally to smoke cigarettes and talk about the guys we were dating at school. We would go back inside, and as a group, Emmy, Janine, Julie, Katie, and I would discuss our own love-life tribulations—as if we knew anything. As if we could even compare to the Sex and the City girls.

Janine and me.

Looking back, I know I had no idea what I was talking about. I knew nothing about love then, but watching Carrie run around made me want to know about love, and as years passed, I perhaps began to know too much.

After college graduation, we went our separate ways: my girlfriends and the girls of Sex and the City. The final episode aired February 22, 2004, and I cried into my martini. I said goodbye to more than my life as an irresponsible kid with nothing to worry about but exams and the rising cost of Nattie Light. I said goodbye to Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, too. I said goodbye to their exploits, their pain, and their love. I said hello to my own, and phew, it was a good thing I had Sex and the City to warn me!

Maybe that’s why I got so emotional watching the Sex and the City movie this week. Those New York girls remind me of fake responsibility and happy hedonism. Now, in my group of friends, we’re all married and having babies—which is great, honestly, and exactly what we wanted. We saw Carrie and Mr. Big, and we wanted that relationship. We wanted to get married like Miranda and Steve, beneath fall foliage in downtown New York. We wanted to have babies like Charlotte … ur, well, I mean, a lot of my girlfriends wanted that. Since college, we’ve all achieved our own version of these wants.

Still, I do miss the simplicity of our college lives. I miss all of us having time to get together every summer for three months straight. I miss the mornings after drinking too much champagne, waking up in Emmy’s apartment and saying, “Let’s go to Denny’s.”

But let’s not forget: I miss Sex and the City and all it stood for culturally and personally. I miss those women. They were who we wanted to be and who we will never forget, because let’s face it: whenever we sit down and watch an old episode, we remember what it felt like to be twenty-one, immature, and happy to be surrounded by our best friends.