‘Sex and the City’: Was Aidan Ever Right for Carrie?
Carrie Bradshaw is known for having relationships that, for one reason or another, just don’t fit. Each boyfriend, inherently more flawed than the next, simply can’t hang with the curly-haired free spirit that Bradshaw is supposed to be. In Season 3, Bradshaw seemingly meets her perfect counterpart in Aidan Shaw, a furniture designer with soulful eyes and a dog to go with them. All should be well, but Carrie can never shake the notion that things just aren’t right, and she wasn’t wrong. So, was Aidan ever right for Carrie?
Carrie and Aidan share absolutely no common interests ‘
When Carrie is dragged to a furniture store with her resident gay best friend, Stanford Blatch, they go with the intention of “ogling some craftsman.” Before she knows anything about Aidan, she’s interested in him. Their shared interests, however, end there.
Carrie is a “girl about town.” She enjoys the hottest bars, weeknight movies, and storing sweaters in her stove. Aidan, on the other hand, enjoys friend chicken, hanging out in the country, and staying in after a hard day’s work. He isn’t a fashion icon and frankly doesn’t seem like he even belongs in Manhattan proper.
Don’t get it wrong, he’s the quintessential “nice guy,” but that doesn’t make him the right guy for Carrie. Surely, he was the right guy for someone, but just not for a sex columnist with a posse of pals.
Aidan’s traditional values are no match for Carrie’s big city dreams
In Season 4, Carrie and Aidan give their love another shot. While Carrie insisted that she missed Aidan, it became pretty apparent, pretty quickly that she simply missed the stability that Aidan provided. Stability, however, became pretty dull, pretty quickly, too.
When Carrie discovers a ring in Aidan’s gym bag, she throws up. That’s never a good sign, but she soldiers on and says yes to his proposal anyway. Let’s be honest. Carrie was never supposed to be married, anyway. The entire concept of marriage doesn’t mesh with Carrie’s spirit. While she isn’t the sex-crazed maneater that Samantha Jones is written to be, she’s also not a traditional marriage-minded lady like Charlotte York. She falls somewhere in between.
Aidan, unlike Carrie, is the “marrying kind,” and forcing Carrie into that box just wasn’t going to end well. Aidan found his counterpart eventually. Where fans last left him, he was married with three kids, and Carrie, although married, was still dancing to the beat of her own drummer with Mr. Big. All is well that ends well, seemingly.
He was never supposed to be “the one” in the first place
Whether you think the writers of Sex and the City got it right, or wrong, Aidan was never actually supposed to be “the one.” Sure, Carrie claimed she was looking for her perfect partner after the train wreck that was her relationship with Mr. Big but was she ever really searching for Mr. Right or was she just looking for the opposite of Mr. Big?
Aidan absolutely was the opposite of Mr. Big, but fans were given little more information from that. Aidan’s backstory was never really fleshed out. No one really knows where he came from, how he came to be in New York, or much about him other than his career path, and the fact that he liked sports. With so little information, one can argue that Aidan was always supposed to a placeholder instead of a life partner.
