From expectations to realizations: Tiktok women and Carrie Bradshaw

Relationships and human interactions remain to me the ultimate everlasting mystery and unresolved issue, the thing I will never understand and the topic I refuse to resume or reduce to mere chemical and neurological transmissions, although neurosciences prove that many neurotransmitters are involved.

But the one puzzle that escapes my vision and the riddle that elopes from the horizons of my humble understandings is why people get attached to the unattached, the always busy, the one that never gives them time and the one that takes them for granted.

Why do we cling to the unavailable, long to the unpredictable, get attached to the unattached, wait for the ones that won’t come back to us, chase the ones who don’t want to stay with us.

I don’t understand the unfunny jokes of faith, the apathetic tails of existence and the harshness of the morals we have to endure and learn through people who wronged us and then proceed to call those “lessons”, to make the suffering somehow worth it, worth it for the sake of self-development.

I hope no woman reading this tells me “not all women are this way” and that no man reading this tells me “not all men”, because as a woman I am indeed not that way nor have I ever been with someone who would make me feel as an intruder in their life. And of course, the roles can always be reversed between men and women, I only write from my perspective as a woman because I have never been a man in a previous life.

I can sense that this blog won’t be as long as the ones I have written before because with disappointment, words lessen and only leave space to debilitating emotions that steal any attempt of us trying to say something to embody the back-stabbing treacherous sentiment that disappointment is.

Again, I am not a Tiktok addict. I must insist on that because Tiktok is “an inspiration” I mention quite often on my blogs and Tiktok remains to me as hieroglyphs on ancient Egyptian walls remain to humanity, an anthropologic source to look into humans’ cultures and social relations through time.

The Tiktok reference for this time is the men who disrespect their wives at the altar the moment of the vows with extremely inappropriate and sexual statements.

I don’t want to be the one, who blames women for everything, but I refuse to believe that those men’s actions come as a total surprise to those women; I refuse to believe that the wives’ shock is as big as the fuss people made. No man does such a thing out of the blue and no man publicly humiliates his wife on their wedding day as a “joke” if he hasn’t been forgiven for worse before.

The point is, no one’s actions are as unbelievable and unimaginable as we would like to think and no one is as unpredictable as we would like to imagine.

Which brings us to “Carrie Bradshaw” in the iconic show “Sex and the City”; regardless of her annoying character, unhealthy habits, her crazy spending habits as only a freelance writer, a detail I choose to consider as a form of escapism from real life’s struggles and her “pick me” attitude, Carrie Bradshaw spends the entire duration of the show (6 seasons) living in the hope of being someday good enough for her love affair Mr. Big and sabotaging every chance she gets with someone new who treats her amazingly (Hi Aiden), every time Mr. Big makes an appearance in her life with always the same convictions he had back when he dated her: He will not commit to her.

So although she breaks up with her Russian romance Aleksander and Mr. Big travels to Paris carrying the intention of a romantic big gesture to gain Carrie back, it does not surprise me at all when he calls her minutes before their wedding to say that he couldn’t get himself to get out of the car and that to say the least, it was too much for him.

I refuse to believe that Carrie was oblivious to all of the signs, to all of the antecedents, early symptoms and precursors to the disease that Mr. Big was (which is an affirmation she admits later after he has left her alone on their wedding day), to the fact that he most definitely was not the right man for her and that she had issues that manifested in her relationship dynamics and that she needed to ‘urgently’ work on.

There is something about the women on Tiktok and their disrespectful men and Carrie and her Mr. Big and other fictional and real characters we encounter in life, that awakens an old not so strange gut wrenching feeling that sneaks out of my heart’s loopholes and leaks as ink out of my soul, an alien part of me, feels immense sentiment of sorrow to those women and my capacity to feel for a man whose children abandoned him when he grew older, or an old lady ballerina who watches a ballet play and longs for a past where she felt beautiful and could still perform and for a child whose parents let them wait hours because they forgot to pick them up from school, I feel for those women as if I have been them.

And though I do indeed blame those women for the big part of this problem, I don’t understand why would anyone choose (and I emphasize on the word choose) to let down someone who loves them and to someone they willingly (and I do emphasize again on the word willingly) chose as a partner. Isn’t each and every one of us lucky to find, in this vast big Universe, amongst a countless number of people who couldn’t care less about the other, someone who sees them as their whole world?

Those poor women who, yes, put themselves in that position but who give relentless chances and forgive out of love, love that is supposed to be the most noble and pure of all sentiments, get the stabbing result of their forgiveness taken for granted and mistaken for stupidity. Those women live their lives with a man who holds their hand under the table but live fearfully the next minutes because they know their partner will drop it at any moment in front of everyone’s eyes and those women live in the uncertainty of how long does it take for their partners to get something right only for a while until they let go again.

Which takes us again to the “men will be men” belief and that only are realistic the relationships where women are fully devoted and forgiving and where men are, well, whatever they are.

There has come a moment in my life in which I have tried to convince myself that men lack emotional intelligence and only do whatever they do because they are simple basic creatures that haven’t fully matured and evolved emotionally to grasp the full meanings and become privy with the complexities of emotions. I have told myself repetitively that they do not have an iota of understanding or empathy (+++) to lean and ask a woman what is wrong or to do without being asked, what us women consider as the most evident of acts or say what we would consider to be the most obvious of the right words.

But there had come a moment in my little short silly life in which I have open my eyes to the truth that laziness is a choice and ignorance is not only a bliss but a choice as well, a choice that lives within most men, most unapologetically and most proudly which led me to think that it would be most beneficial to me to keep to myself any expectation I had from a man, in order to protect myself and my silly little heart, if I never told a man what I wanted or needed, it would be better than telling him, knowing he knows what I want, but see that he still chose to fail me and I couldn’t live with that because it would have led to the discussion of “am I worth it?”

Men do know the right thing to do, the right thing to say, the right way to behave, the right face to put, the right shirt to wear, the right gift to give, the right tone to use and the right plans to make.

They just don’t because they simply don’t like you enough to keep chasing you even after they got you as if your feelings towards them have become a given or because your feelings are indeed a given when you choose to repetitively dismiss their disrespect and nonchalance, sometimes praised for their casualness and unconcern with a “cool girl” attitude coming to greet them every time they wrong you and you choose not to have “that discussion” because you don’t want to be the nagging woman.

But the emotional oblivion and sentimental insensitivity that gets a hold of men does not last forever, because with their senselessness and blankness to “women’s common sense” ( which is basically just common sense, the word “women” has been added there only because men love to call their deviant behaviour ‘jokes’, ‘pranks’, ‘not understanding what they really had to do’, ‘casualness’, ‘coolness’, ‘accidents’, ‘simplicity’, and all types of other excuses you may have heard before) comes eventually to an end and a man who has wronged you never forgets you, mainly because one day you are tired of apologizing for wanting more after he has convinced you that you are too demanding and must be cooler, one day you unravel the truth, ‘he is just no that into you’, the man faces you with the second most prepared emotion he is ready to feel and let out at any moment (because if carelessness is an emotion then it would be the first); anger, anger for seeing that you do deserve better and you deserve CARE. And the way men have been trained for anger all of their lives, and women for guilt no matter what they have done or said, men, even though always late, feel regret for the anger they have shown, and women are angry for the rest of their lives for the regret they must have endured since they were a little angelic child and for the apologies they gave when they only asked for fairness and for the excuses they have given to ravel the truth, waiting for a better truth to somehow manifest someday.

I must insist again that roles do not always have to come in the way described in this blog, they could be easily reversed and examples of that are out there in the world. The same way that there are examples of relationships that thrive in love, live within it, embrace it, cherish what they have and live happily ever after.