Member-only story
Are You a Bad Friend for Administering Tough Love?
Revisiting a scene from Sex and the City that really pissed me off.
I was on my sofa this morning, mindlessly scrolling through YouTube Shorts. I’ve been watching a lot of Sex and the City (1998–2004) content lately, so several of my suggestions were clips from the show posted to HBO’s YouTube channel.
One particular scene came from the third season’s finale. It featured the main character (in every sense of the word) Carrie Bradshaw and her best friend Miranda Hobbes, the no-nonsense lawyer who wasn’t afraid to speak hard truths to her girlfriends.
The two women are shopping together and get into an argument after Carrie reveals that she is going to lunch with her ex-boyfriend — the infamous Mr. Big, who Carrie had a pretty toxic relationship with over the course of the original series.
If you’re not familiar with the show, let me provide some context. At this point in the series, Carrie and Big’s relationship includes (but definitely isn’t limited to) the following toxic “red flag” behaviors:
- Big refusing to introduce Carrie to people in his life, making her feel like he was ashamed of her.
- Carrie showing up to the church where Big took his mother every week, despite the fact that he…
