MR. BiG
how to date man who no think much
NOTE FROM THE WRiTER:
This is the essay form of another TikTok I made that resonated. I’ll definitely continue to share my thoughts on male characters and relationships in traditionally “girl media”, so long as you ladies will have me. This is lots of fun.
iNTRO
BiG never broke Carrie’s heart.
Carrie broke her own heart trying to find depth in the man that always lived on the surface.
So I can admit, I thought Sex and the City was such a girl’s show— until my ex finally changed my mind. She showed it to me and now it’s my second favorite show after The Sopranos.
Samantha’s my favorite character, but in close second is definitely Big. That’s my fucking guyyy.
And last night when I threw on an episode, I thought to myself... why do I love Big so much? So I took some notes, figured I’d do a little bit of a breakdown on his psychology and why he’s such a great character. From the male perspective.
AVOiDANT?
There’s a lot of discourse about BiG being AVOiDANT in terms of attachment style. I’m not denying he might be a little AVOiDANT, but the bigger thing is that he’s actually just not that emotionally complex.
I think a lot of ladies and especially Carrie analyze BiG and men like him, like they’re this sort of puzzle—but he’s just somebody who’s coasted through life and that ends up breeding emotional laziness. He’s this iSLAND of SELF-SATiSFACTiON with a partner that wants him to be more profound than he really is. To the point that he almost succeeds in making the main character look villainous.
EMOTiONAL PHYSiCS
Let’s take a look at the whiteboard and break it down.
All his privilege leads him to have pretty much no inner life.
And no inner life leads someone to have low depth, which makes you easygoing—and combine that with having power, having status…it makes you a high charm sort of person. It’s like hanging out with a little boy who’s just perpetually happy.
He prioritizes fun over his feelings because he just doesn’t have many feelings.
Him being silent, him being charismatic gives Carey that impression of having a mysterious aura. Him having all that success puts him on emotional autopilot, which is why him saying something like “I’m moving to Paris” doesn’t seem like a ridiculous thing to him.
And the equation when it comes down to it is you take Carrie’s depth—a deep layered protagonist—with Big’s blank nature, it leads to that obsession and that projection. And the beauty of it is his flatness ends up being her growth curve. It’s only when she self-stabilizes that he finally commits.
We can take a look at this graph. we got Big in green, we got Carrie in red. The The Y-axis is stability, the X-axis is time.
Over time, Big’s baseline pretty much never moves, but it’s Carrie who finally wrangles herself. And that’s when Big meets her and actually decides—hey, you’re the person that I want to be with and I can trust that we can live a life that’ll be pleasant to me and pleasant to you.
HE’S JUST A MAN
He’s never had to build an inner life because his outer world has always worked for him. He was born into generational wealth. He runs a super successful real estate empire. He dates beautiful women. He has this lavish social circle and life.
I’ve had a fraction of BiG’s privilege and have engaged in worse patterns in my early 20s. I can’t imagine a lifetime of his existence.
Carrie projects this depth onto him that he just does not have. She assigns meaning to his silences, to his half smiles, to his little actions. but there’s nothing to decode. He’s not hiding anything.
He runs his empire and to survive that and that stress—I empathize with it a little bit because I ran my own company for some time—you can deal with that in different ways. And he chooses to deal with it the way that I chose to deal with it, which is to have this charming, unbothered, laid back exterior, which is to a fault. It’s a form of armor. It’s a form of being efficient in the way that you deal with people. But it’s also emotional underdevelopment disguised as charisma. He doesn’t fear intimacy. He just doesn’t prioritize it.
Like many men, and I definitely resonate with this, he really only accesses vulnerability when something breaks him open by force. Whether it’s being humiliated with the actress he was dating or having a literal heart attack. He doesn’t grow through empathy or curiosity for others. He only goes through catastrophe that devastates himself.
It’s not that he doesn’t value Carrie. He just doesn’t really value much in general. His baseline is comfort. His default is things always work out for me. When life never forces you to feel deeply, you sort of skate by and Carrie read his skating as a sort of mystery.
He’s even so transparent about what he wants and what he has to offer. If you remember in S1 E2 he talks to Carrie about how there’s so many gorgeous women in New York City, but you end up just wanting to be with the one that makes you laugh.
His idea of a fun night is staying in watching TV. He knows who he is. And he’s happy with himself.
CARRiE’S FOiL
That’s precisely what makes Big such an incredible character. He’s the perfect foil because he’s this aspirational, vague surface area for the messy, complex Carrie to stand out against. He casts a shadow for her to light up. And because he doesn’t move—she has to.
Carrie wins not by changing him, but by changing herself. So when she walks away, he ends up stepping forward.
It is this dynamic that makes the show have its natural ups and downs, its timeless relatability. More importantly, I believe it teaches us an ultimately redemptive yet still realistic lesson.
Whether you are a man or a woman—choose yourself first. That’s what leads people to either be fully repelled or to respect us and say: okay, I see you for who you really are…and I choose you too.
