40s is the new 20s. If you have any doubts, check out Sex and the City2. The girls are back – Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), and Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), all in Louis Vuitton, Versace, Prada, Galliano, Christian Dior, straight out of a glossy magazine! Costume change was up to 782, so goes the report. For an escapist like me, I find the foursome colourful, remarkable, and fulfilling.
Imagine if we had our own Sex and the City quartet, Betty Irabor would fit in nicely as Carrie – haute to a T, soft-spoken, and tough around the edges. Funmi Iyanda could be Samantha (not based on her excessive need for sex, of course. Samantha lives by her hormones!); both are however fierce on their beliefs, outspoken, and highly driven. Miranda could well be portrayed by someone like Ayo Obe, the lawyer or in some other way, Amma Ogan (of Next), only because I find them very down to earth and totally unfussy about glamour in its excesses. Charlotte could just be Omowunmi Akinnifesi – jumpy, cute, attractive, happy. See? So there we have it, our own famous four!
The heart-beat of this article, however, has little to do with fashion and a lot to do with marriage, in this case, Carrie and Big’s marriage.
When Carrie and Big had their first fight, it was over a couch. A Couch! Carrie talked about how the couch could be an intruder, interfering with their bonding process blah blah. Poor couch! In the larger segment in dear Nigeria, a wife fights her husband over the need to GET a couch because the father-of-six is intent on getting a second wife instead with the windfall from a good uncle. Life’s unfair!
So back to Carrie; their second argument was over the television in the bedroom. Carrie finds the idea of having a TV distracting to say the least, since she expects their attention to be on each other rather than on a movie or sports. Ultimately the decision of taking a few days ‘off’ the marriage was conceived by Carrie and endorsed by Big. These ‘off-days’ was a plan to bring back the spirit of the union, but this, of course, births new worries for Carrie, thinking it’s a fast way to adultery. Ironically, she walked right into her own fears with her Jimmy Choo heels when she encountered an ex (Aidan) in faraway Abu Dhabi (the extravagant and opulent capital city of the United Arab Emirates where she and the other girls were enticed by Samantha and whisked away, all expense paid by a film financier) and permitted a throaty kiss to take place. She cries, shares the kiss experience with her friends, and finally confesses to Big over the phone. She gets back to New York, and Big finds a way to ‘punish’ her by embellishing her finger with a black diamond so big and expensive, reminding her to always stay faithful.
You are allowed to chew on popcorn and sip from your tetra-pak of orange juice whilst this is on, but make sure you shake the remnants off when leaving the theatre. Do not take the feeling home, I warn you! None of it is real, except for those haute couture (which isn’t so real if you don’t have money), and wrinkles on Samantha and Carrie. Building a foundation under this castle would read a little different (especially if it is built on Nigerian soil!).
For one, Big would most likely get bored with spending all his time at home listening to Carrie whine over non-issues. He’d want to hang out with his own peeps for a beer and some dirty talk, and ogle at other men’s women. He’d want less of Carrie’s friends in her life. At some point, he may want a child. He would think she was mad when that couch issue came up; and would be totally certain she’s a raving lunatic when she called him over the phone to share her kiss experience and ask for forgiveness especially since he was not in the know; but she gets a befitting gift instead. Do we go a-kissing then? You never know, you just might get a big rock as worthy penalty, or in a less fortunate stance, a slap!
But there is one thing I do agree with, Carrie did make it clear that every marriage is unique and comes with its own peculiar concerns. So whilst Charlotte, on the other hand, is being driven crazy by her bratty kids, and paranoid by her husband lusting over their busty nanny; it still remains a fact that not all men are dogs (needless to say not every male would hit on a pretty nanny just for the fun of it. Jude’s Law doesn’t always apply! Lol!). The best part of the movie would be that all the men manage to remain unsullied despite the glitz of cosmopolitan living, and seem deeply in love and faithful to their wives.
If you ever doubt any of the formula of marriage from the movie perspective or mine, there’s one thing we can all agree on: Samantha! She is one crazy woman, her own definition of happiness is ‘riding’ on an SUV under a full moon with the sexiest male Abu Dhabi could find. And I think if everything else fails, sex is still one portion of love that can reignite passion or ease tension. Voila!
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