You Hate Carrie Bradshaw Because You Are Carrie Bradshaw

4/9/2026

In the midst of my newfound free time, I found myself scouring all of the streaming platforms I have, alongside all the ones I still mooch off my mother for. It was then I realized I had never watched any of the Sex and the City movies.

If you read my blog, Why Every Girl Should Watch Sex and the City Once in Their Life, you may remember my vow to not watch And Just Like That to preserve my favoritism toward the original series. So, two movies later, and a whole lot of Abu Dhabi, I finally completed the rest of the digestible Sex and the City content.

Now, SATC is a timeless show, as every single situation you can imagine going through while dating is captured. It couldn’t matter less if you’re single, dating, married, divorced, or celibate. Every time I have a love life issue, I can guarantee that one of the four women has experienced it—most likely Carrie.

While Carrie Bradshaw is widely celebrated for her avant-garde fashion sense and impeccable taste (in clothes, not men), she is also one of the most criticized female characters in all of sitcom history. People constantly berate her for being immature, male-centered, judgmental, insecure, and selfish, which all happen to be true.

And you people say you want more complex female leads.

However, I will let you in on a secret: people, society, and social media could never turn me against her. The truth of the matter is that we hate Carrie Bradshaw because we are Carrie Bradshaw. She does a fantastic job of bringing out the discomfort of characteristics we are not fond of in ourselves.

While you may preach to your friends and family that you are nothing like her—that her decision-making processes are awful, and that she parades herself around as holier-than-thou—we have all been her before. Made the same mistakes, same excuses, same patterns. Please, let us not forget our roots.

I promise there has been some point across your adulthood where you have been a bad friend because you are too consumed with your own life, placed an unworthy man on a pedestal and became a needy victim, or had a secret affair with an ex-lover behind your friend’s back. You see my point.

Ultimately, Carrie represents a juvenile state of being. After all, how can you grow into becoming more like Miranda, Samantha, or Charlotte without going through the delinquencies of being Carrie?

I have to love Carrie, for to me, she is a coming-of-age character, and perhaps one of the more realistic ones. She has obvious flaws, and the audience judges her for them harshly, simply to avoid looking in a mirror of the past mistakes they have made.

We also punish her for her inability to stand up for herself and hold firm boundaries, particularly around Mr. Big. It should feel nearly nostalgic for most viewers, in that we have all experienced a Mr. Big at one point in time—a lover over the years who, no matter how hard we seemingly tried, we could not get over; someone who made us weak every time they were around, and whose awful actions we allowed to dictate our lives. We simply have to be more forgiving.

You may push her aside as you rewatch the series for the seventh time, but as annoying as you may find her, you should be more focused on the spotlight reflecting internally. What you loathe about her may be something you actually detest about yourself. And just maybe she can become less of a fashion inspiration, and more of a reflection of growth.

Or perhaps both.

Long live Miss Bradshaw and her wonderful messiness of men and Manolo Blahniks.