Seeing as how Olivia Rodrigo made her grand announcement early on in the You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love promo period that one of the songs was inspired by Sex and the City (specifically, a line Miranda [Cynthia Nixon] says to Steve [David Eigenberg] in “Ex and the City”), it should be no wonder that the album is decidedly “Carrie Bradshaw” (Sarah Jessica Parker). That is, Carrie Bradshaw when she’s dating Aidan Shaw (John Corbett)—both times. In season three and season four.
And while some would argue she really was happy during the first go-around, well, if that were so, she probably wouldn’t have sabotaged the relationship by cheating on him with Big (Chris Noth). Worse still, all but ensuring their breakup by telling him about it (to which Aidan literally says, “I just wish I didn’t know”). Almost as if she wanted the sadness (both general and relationship-related) she had been suppressing to be able to come out more legitimately, as it does when she starts crying at the end of the season three episode, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” after informing Aidan of her “Big affair” before Charlotte’s (Kristin Davis) wedding, of all moments.
So it is that Carrie can finally claim her “right” to be miserable in the aftermath, which must truly have been what she was feeling most of the time during her “tenure” with Aidan (whether one is referring to “part un” or “part deux” of that tenure). Especially with all that “faking being a better person” effort she was having to make from the start (complete with giving up smoking…or at least trying to for a while).
Alors oui, whether consciously or subconsciously, it’s obvious that Carrie was trying to pull the rip cord on her Aidan relationship by any means necessary (thinking in her own way, “And it feels like medication/And it’s good for me, I’m sure/But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore/It’ll never be the cure”—least of all the cure for her ever-burgeoning credit card debt). Alas, she eventually found out/remembered that being “breakup sad” was little better than “girl so in love” sad. Hence, picking things back up with Aidan at the beginning of season four. But no, not merely “picking things back up” so much as begging him (nay, harassing him) to take her back. Maybe that’s part of why she also later couldn’t go through with marrying him, knowing she had fulfilled the Rodrigo lyrics of “begged” that go, “Nothing’s quite enough/When I know that to get it I begged” (and the same goes for Charlotte about many things with Trey [Kyle MacLachlan], including her marriage “proposal”—to herself).
Though, at first, Carrie tries her to best to feign as if she’s what Big refers to (cringily) as “the marrying kind,” it doesn’t take very many episodes after Aidan proposes for both of them to come to terms with the fact that she’s not. Something that Big tries to tell Carrie in the season four episode, “Just Say Yes,” also putting it as follows: “He’s not the guy for you.” Carrie barely musters the indignance to reply, “He might be the guy for me.” But “might” isn’t much of a ringing endorsement when “true” love is supposed to feel “so sure.” Which is how Rodrigo thought she ought to have felt about Partridge—and initially did during the crush and honeymoon phase, only to find that, still lingering beneath the surface of that happiness are the personal and mental health issues she pushed aside. In addition to the issues with the relationship that only started to become more noticeable once the pheromones wore off. All of which Rodrigo acknowledges on the “Girl So in Love” side of the record that concludes with “purple.” A track that for all its “sweetness,” lets on that something more sinister is afoot with this level of codependency (e.g., “And we fight/Over who I’m hanging out with/Like a real couple/It’s a small world/When it can only revolve around us two” and “So it goes that you/Kissed my neck/Made our paths intersect/Till the two lines formed circle/And I melt with you/Your red and my blue/Now I see the world in/Purple”). Of the sort that Aidan unwittingly speaks on in the abovementioned season three episode, “All or Nothing.”
This done when explaining to Carrie, who walks in on him tinkering with a piece of furniture that she finds out he’s freshly making from scratch for Charlotte and Trey’s wedding, “It’s two different types of wood from two different trees. They blend together and make it strong, just like—” “A mixed drink?” Carrie chimes in. Aidan continues, “Kind of like two people in love.” Or rather, how society and pop culture at large keeps portraying “love” to be. Part and parcel of a concept like “the one.” A notion that Carrie hinges her entire life (not to mention her career) on. Panicking in the “Just Say Yes” episode after seeing an engagement ring in Aidan’s bag and then panicking again when she doesn’t see it. The freakout prompts her to ask Miranda (who helps pick out the first pear-shaped ring that Carrie hates), “What if he realized I’m not the one?” Miranda points out, “You’re not sure if he’s the one either.”
And perhaps that’s at least part of what’s making Carrie feel, you guessed it, pretty sad for a girl so “in love.” Which is to say that, at her most in love with Aidan, she still doesn’t feel “quite convinced” (something Aidan took note of in the form of wearing her engagement ring as a necklace in “Change of a Dress”). Certainly not in the way she did with Big, who made her feel sad in entirely different (and far less innovative ways).
Nonetheless, Carrie (undoubtedly in no small part due to her generational alignment) still never learned that she ought to pivot to having “real big expectations” after dealing with so many emotionally stunted or emotionally needy men. This being what Rodrigo declares on the penultimate track, “expectations,” announcing things like, “I won’t settle” and “Now I take careful consideration.” Clearly, Carrie never quite gained that level of maturity (see: entering into a relationship for yet a third time on And Just Like That…).
But it’s the album’s closer, “cigarette smoke,” that is, of course, the Carrie track. Not only for the obvious reason of Carrie being a smoker through and through, but because it’s all about the regret of spending too much time on a relationship that one knew in their heart was never truly right. Hence, Rodrigo’s cutting lyrics, “I regret you/And how long I stayed/I resent you for not being brave/Oh/Tell me something honest/So the memories turn dark/You said that I made loving look easy/Until I made it hard/Give me back my time/And I will give you back your heart.” If that’s not Aidan and Carrie vibes, then what is? As for the lines that follow, they’re more applicable to another “major” Carrie boyfriend, Jack Berger (Ron Livingston). Namely, to the “acting” allegory Carrie wields in the season six episode, “Lights, Camera, Relationship!” That Rodrigo digs the knife into Partridge’s profession with the lyrics, “I thought that we played the perfect couple/Until you didn’t want the part.”
This sentiment mimicking the signs Berger was showing of tapping out of the relationship with Carrie, most especially in “Lights, Camera, Relationship!” when he can’t even bring himself to fulfill the task of being Carrie’s date at Smith Jerrod’s play, Full Moon. Prompting Carrie to lie to Samantha (Kim Cattrall) when she asks where Berger is by telling her he wasn’t feeling well and had to go home early. This leading to her voiceover conclusion, “Maybe we were all acting, all the time. And tonight, I was playing the part of the woman in the great relationship whose boyfriend was coming down with a cold.”
Rodrigo, instead, played the part of the woman in the great relationship whose boyfriend was making her sadness feel all the more heightened because of the personal issues that wouldn’t go away just because she thought she was a girl so in love. The same, of course, goes double for Carrie and her relationship with Aidan.
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