No Sex and No City

How watching the original seasons of Sex and the City is making me feel less alone. Also: A good book you should NOT listen to and Costco finds (courtesy of my mom).

Every night after work for the past two weeks, I drag myself to the couch — a white slipcovered IKEA number that seemed like a great idea at the time — and watch a few episodes of the OG Sex and the City (SATC).

Lately, my brain is fried, and after eight-ish hours of thinking, thinking, thinking for work, I just want to turn it off. It’s like I’ve been feeding it kale all day and just want a big piece of cake (preferably funfetti).

Believe it or not, I have never seen those first few seasons of the iconic HBO (or are we really calling it MAX?) series. I mean by now I’ve probably watched most episodes when I’d somehow landed on a cable channel that was in the middle of an SATC marathon and ended up watching 10 in a row.

But when the series debuted in June of 1998, I was too cheap to pay for HBO and really too busy to care as I navigated life caring for three kids under six. I was just about to turn 32, my youngest had just turned one, and my own hit HBO series would have been called “No Sex and No City” with voiceovers by an overwhelmed suburban housewife.

Ironically, Carrie Bradshaw was also 32 when the series debuted. But our lives could not have been more different. While Carrie was out swilling cosmos with her besties, teetering around NYC in Manolo’s, and navigating the dating scene as an “older” woman, I was just trying to keep three other humans alive. My fashion sense tended toward overalls and stretched-out nursing bras and the only reason I found myself awake at 2 a.m. was to clean the barf that a little one did not realize was coming until too late.

By the time the series wrapped up in 2004 and Big finally said the words Carrie had longed to hear lo those many seasons, I was up to my ears in four kids and in a marriage that was slowly sliding downhill. While the four women spent a lot of time worrying about coupling, I was beginning to think about what uncoupling would look like.

My dive into the old series started a few weekends ago after my daughter and I moved the youngest sibling into a house he’ll be living in this year off-campus with eight other boys at a big state school.

I’d been dreading what these new digs were going to look like IRL and the situation completely lived up to my expectations. Stained wall-to-wall carpeting, a bathtub with years of grime baked into the enamel, and a filthy string mop standing upright in a corner by the front door to greet you as you arrived. I think it was the exact same mop that was standing sentinel in my oldest son’s college fraternity house hallway 10 years earlier. I felt like I’d been put in a DeLorean by a crazy scientist and zapped back to 1986 when I dated guys in fraternity houses except back then — I, too, had no standards.  

But my youngest, who has always liked being a part of a big pack, is thrilled to be living with all of his buddies and to also have his own room to escape and have downtime. He put together all the furniture I bought him on Prime Day, hung posters and beer signs on the wall, and set up his PC so he could game long into the night.

After the obligatory run to Walmart and Chick-fil-A, we waved goodbye to our college kid (my daughter and I are giving old married couple vibes) and headed back east for about an hour and a half to stay at some random hotel in Harrisburg, PA for the night. My daughter and I just wanted to collapse on our king bed and watch a movie but the TV would not work with us and we randomly started watching an episode from Season 3 of Sex and the City on my laptop. It was quick. It was funny. And it went down easy, requiring zero effort on our part as we lay on the bed in our pjs exhausted from carrying things up and down the carpet-stained staircase that has not seen a vacuum since the Obama administration.

When I got home, watching the entire SATC canon from the very beginning seemed like a good idea. I had run out of shows to watch and didn’t feel like starting something new or having to pay attention. Lately, I put captions on for everything. I can’t understand what anyone is saying and wouldn’t care if it meant I could still follow the storyline. But for SATC, I do not need any captions. I can eat my dinner, look at my phone, and play the NYTimes Spelling Bee while following along with the action.

The irony of watching the show all these many years later is that now, my life resembles the show more now than it did in 1998. Maybe I’m a lot older than the characters, prefer wearing Birkenstocks to Loboutins, and don’t drink booze anymore. But Carrie’s observations about life as a single person in a world full of couples have become entirely relatable.

Recently, I watched the one where a guy Miranda has been sharing flirty email banter comes to stay with her while looking for a place to live in NYC. She thinks this is the perfect opportunity to ignite a relationship except he immediately falls for one of Miranda’s friends on the first night. By the end of his stay a few weeks later, the two are getting married and Miranda is like, “What the actual fuck?”

The episode highlights the, “What’s wrong with me?” feeling many single people have. Those feelings of unlovability. Like, will I ever be good enough for someone to love or am I inherently giving off DAMAGED MERCHANDISE vibes?

In the meantime, we singles hustle to stay busy. While all the couples are making plans for dinner or quick getaways with each other — or just deciding to stay in on a Saturday night and watch a movie — we single people are working hard to find something to do with our weekends.

My neighbors’ backyard abuts my front porch with a gate that they often use as a shortcut. They are a young family with a new baby but always have friends over with their kids to run around the backyard on warm summer nights and sit around the fire pit. I always hate when they see me sitting on my porch reading while they’re entertaining. Like, I can’t stand how depressing that must be for them to look at. I often take myself inside and up to my bedroom where I can pull down my blackout shades to prevent anyone else from seeing the sad little diorama of my life sometimes.

I started to complain to my friend, Dan, one early morning this week as I squatted and pushed a 5-pound weight out in front of me as a little warm-up before our workout. “Being single is so much work,” I told him as I straightened up, and got ready to list all the reasons why that was true for me. How I have to do all the things — pay the bills, monitor the pests in the house, and always cook up new ways to stay busy so I have something to share with my team at work on Monday mornings.

But Dan quickly cut me off, “You haven’t been married for a long time,” he said. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in a relationship.” And then he goes on to remind me how hard it is to navigate life with another person. “I’d say 95% of the people I work with are miserable in their marriages,” he told me.

“You’re the lucky one,” he said. “Go date a few guys to remind yourself what it’s like.”

I haven’t been in a romantic relationship in a long time, as Dan observed, but I have been in close relationships with my four kids, which reminds me how tender feelings can be and the frustration I feel when people I love won’t just do what I want them to do. How they have to have feelings and opinions, too. I’ve learned a lot over the years of building grown-up and (hopefully) less codependent relationships with them.

I told Dan that I just wanted someone to hang out with. Someone to go for a walk or the movies with. “Yeah, but then you want to go to the movie and the other person doesn’t.” He reminded me that it wasn’t like having a built-in playmate who just did and said exactly whatever you wanted.

I had dinner on Saturday night with another single and sober woman and honestly, she was a great date. We drank water with our gluten-free meal and talked about books and life. We rode bikes up to the boardwalk and ate soft-serve ice cream and sat on a bench facing toward the ocean and watched the moon — a hazy red supermoon — slowly rise in the sky. As she got in her car to go home, we agreed it had been a great night and as I walked the dog around the block, I really hoped my neighbors saw I was wearing a nice outfit and not my usual athleisure wear.

So, what’s the answer? If we got to the end of a 25-minute episode, what would Carrie say in one of her iconic voiceovers? That nothing is perfect? The best relationship we can have is with ourselves, perhaps? Or that being loved is worth all the work? Romance comes and goes but friends are forever?

I’m not quite sure.

I think she would say that having interactions with people who you enjoy is worth the effort and isolating yourself can throw you down some dark emotional rabbit holes. Carrie would remind herself that she is loved by many people who appreciate her for who she is and that sometimes, you just need to have faith that it’s all going exactly the way it’s supposed to go.

And just like that, she’d close her laptop, light a cigarette and blow smoke out the window toward the blue Manhattan sky.

sunday shares: read + watch + cook + buy

Public service announcement: I downloaded the audio version of Jennifer Weiner’s new novel, The Breakaway, and it has shown me just how important good narration is to the experience. The narrator, Nikki Blonsky (who starred in Hairspray on Broadway), is horrible. It’s like she’s reading the words for the first time, stumbling over sentences and seemingly surprised by what’s happening in the story. I dug into the reviews on Audible and there are so many that start, “I never leave reviews but this was too horrible to ignore,” and then go on to say that they’d recommend reading instead (because it is a great story). Lesson learned.

The perfect everyday earring. In May, when I was buying anything that seemed like a good idea to bring to an annual work conference, I ordered these hoops from Nordstrom Rack and haven’t taken them off much since then. I don’t know what they are made out of since they’re only $40, but they still look great and I wear them in the shower and to bed. They’re the perfect little everyday ear something.

The biggest box of cookies. I went to Costco with my mom last week, which is a bad idea because I came home with a giant box of the most delicious cookies. They are like thinly sliced biscotti and come in little plastic packages with three each. I brought half the box to work to avoid eating the whole thing in one week.

A little crunch with your yogurt. At mom’s urging I also picked up a bag of this granola that is very delicious on my morning yogurt (mixed with chocolate protein, blueberries, toasted slivered almonds, and a scoop of chia seeds but only on days that I’m home so there’s no one to bear witness to all the little round seeds that get stuck in my teeth).

How to trick young adults into reading: My 20yo worked at a pizza place on the Asbury Park boardwalk this summer and spent many days making dough and bagging cheese. To fill those long hours, he started listening to free audiobooks he found on Spotify, like The Hobbit. I told him he could use my Audible credits and gave him some suggestions for what to listen to (real casual-like, so he couldn’t sense my excitement). Every day he’d come home and tell me about what was happening in the story he was listening to (and that I’d already read). He reported that he started to cry during one particularly sad moment in the novel “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.” And kept wondering if Demon Copperhead’s life was ever going to get any better. He’d downloaded The Great Santini right before he left for school and I know it’s going to sit unopened in his library as he gets back into the swing of school. Maybe he’ll rediscover it over winter break when his only other option is talking to me.

Life wisdom, courtesy of The Muppets. All this talk about whether life is better alone or coupled up reminds me for some reason of this song from The Muppet Movie (circa 1979), which I discovered upon Googling that I still knew all the words to but never know where my phone is. Please explain.