Sex & the City

I went to see Sex & the City the movie with a girlfriend today, and loved it! They did a great job, and I laughed and cried. It really moved me, especially all the ups and downs of the love stories. I am not a big TV watcher, and in fact over the past 10 years have hardly turned the TV on. Ever. I do rent movies and that is pretty much it. There have been a few exceptions, and one of the shows I watched was Sex & The City. I actually started watching it when I was in a book club that I jokingly called the Vagina Dialogues because every time we'd have a book club someone would say the word Vagina. Usually loudly! That started when we were at the very first book club I had attended (it had been going on for a while before then). We were at one woman's house, who has since moved, and she had a teenage son upstairs. Somehow the word came up and K was like "Shh, my son is upstairs!" and G, who is hilarious, was like, "He's a TEENAGER. Do you think he doesn't know the word vagina? VAGINA! VAGINA! VAGINA!" We were all cracking up as K continued shooshing.

Then the word just seemed to come up every book club for some reason or another. That book club was as close as you could get to Sex & The City (though we were all married, and living in Houston...), and we talked about some of the same things. We even went to see Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues when it came to town. Whch was fantastic and moving, by the way. (You can rent this in DVD and I'm going to have my daughter watch it with me).

Anyway so the book club used to watch Sex & The City episodes now and then, and I got hooked so then went and rented all the back episodes. I've seen them all. It's such a fantastic show because they talk about so many real relationship issues including of course ones about sex. Even though some people think it pushes the boundaries, and was over the top, I loved that about it. I love that Carrie is a writer-journalist and I related to her a lot. In the movie, I especially related to the Carrie-Big relationship. I've mentioned it here on this blog before (in wild heart in 2006, I quoted Carrie as saying "Maybe some women aren't meant to be tamed. Maybe they need to run free until they find someone just as wild to run with."). Their love is so big and intense and yet there are many obstacles they each had to overcome to be able to give in to the love to make it work. And it took ten years, several relationships in between, and them growing up and realizing (or him realizing...) that it was the One. They loved each other so much, but they got in their own way.

I don't think love or relationships are ever easy. That is fantasyland. They can be amazingly beautiful and intense and gorgeous and fun, but they involve real people with imperfections. I heard a quote recently that love is about half give and half forgive. And that is interesting because forgiveness is a big theme of the Sex & The City movie. (Spoiler alert!) Carrie advises the lawyer Miranda, who analyzes everything out in her head and on paper on whether she should try to work things back out with Steve who had cheated one time during a 6-month dry spell in their marriage, she advises her to go with her heart and her feelings. And then at the end when Carrie just throws all the logic aside and runs into Big's arms... love defies logic sometimes. Love is a real and powerful force that draws people together despite obstacles, oceans, walls, reason. Even sometimes when you had stopped believing in it.