Unfortunately, ladies, it doesn’t quite work that way. Even Charlotte from Sex and the City learn the hard way.. While the show is fittingly fantastical, the scenario proves a point. Charlotte is happily married to Harry, a balding Jewish lawyer with a flabby butt who speaks with his mouth full. He’s the love of her life and she can’t imagine being with anyone else. But rewind a few years and she was married to Trey, who checked every box on her list He was tall, dark, broodingly handsome, and rich.. But her Prince Charming turned out to be a dud in the sack. And their marriage turned out to be a dud too. No happy ending there. Hence she had to chuck out that list and start all over again with entirely different criteria. Not lower, or ‘settling’—just different. Harry may not have looked or acted the part of a “traditional” Prince Charming, but his unapologetic honesty, self-deprecating humor, and kind heart offered Charlotte a better storybook ending than she could have ever imagined — and she fantasized about that stuff a lot.
I had a similar situation. I was married to a woman who had everything on my click list. She was absolutely gorgeous, a physician as well like myself. younger than me...ect. And my marriage didn't go well. I throw out my check list and I am looking for something different. I have an amazing life, but probably a lot like you, I am here hoping to round out my world with an honest, sincere, fun loving person who will share the warmth and companionship of a meaningful relationship. I am looking for my Charlotte.
In one of the loveliest moments in the show’s history, Charlotte quizzes Harry on why he refuses to marry a shiksa (in other words, her). In the course of the conversation, she explains to him, anxiously and mournfully, that she’s unlikely to be able to bear children. He tells her, without even taking a breath, that he loves her no matter what, and that they can adopt a child — they’ll be just as much of a family that way. His response is so kind and so compassionate that Charlotte recognizes it as fundamentally “Jewish” — in other words, she sees him as the kind of person that she herself would like to be. Of course, she already is that kind of person, but the moment cements them as a solid match, a case of two people reaching out toward the best in each other — the very sort of romantic realism that a good marriage requires.
Its so hard to find any woman now who has a heart, and willing to give up everything for love. Charlotte in the show went so far as to change religions for Harry, converting to Judaism, an act that could be seen as a way of subsuming herself just to please a man. Does that necessarily make her the perfect mother and wife, the dream of every man who’d prefer not to be challenged by a woman? Charlotte is the show’s least-threatening character. Many of us like to think that “difficult” women are somehow superior to easygoing ones (when, in fact, sometimes they’re simply more of a pain in the ass, without necessarily being smarter or more interesting). But even if — or maybe because — Charlotte has sometimes seemed blindly hopeful and optimistic, she’s the show’s most demanding character. Her attitude toward love and sex isn’t as casual as that of the other three, and her expectations are definitely higher — she seems to want more out of life than any of them, a tough bill for any ordinary man to fill.
Of the four women on “Sex and the City,” Charlotte is the one who has historically demanded the impossible out of romance. But instead of being disappointed, she has ended up being happier than she ever could have imagined. That sounds more like the direct opposite of guileless simplicity. Throughout the run of the show, there’s always been something resolutely sensible about Charlotte. She’s like a Jane Austen heroine transplanted to modern Manhattan, coming around to the fact that having a plan is not only useless, it’s plain old boring — not nearly as thrilling as welcoming the surprises that life cooks up for us.
I might be your surprise...if you let me.
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