Everyone has a Mr Big

Unattainable, rich, handsome, older, everyone got their heart broken by a Mr Big

Unattainable, rich, handsome, older, everyone got their heart broken by a Mr Big at some point.

If you happen to be on substack without succumbing like the rest of us to the fantasy of being Carrie Bradshaw, Mr. Big is Carrie’s love interest throughout the entire show and subsequent Sex and the City movies.

He’s introduced in the very first episode, as the catalyst for Carrie’s spiral into romantic madness. He is everything a guy should be if you’re a masculinist. He’s tall, brooding, has a bad boy habit of dating models and actresses and makes a shit load of money from a nonspecified job. He’s the pinnacle of the male character tiktok love interest. And yet we’ve all met one, we’ve all fallen for one, and we can all remember.

My Mr. Big was Mr. M. Mr. M was tall, handsome, vegan, with parents who owned a Vignard in Bordeaux and went to an expensive private business school. He was older, more mature, and navigated the world with an air of sophistication I couldn’t help but admire.

But I couldn’t help but wonder, isn’t Mr. Bg a materialistic fantasy? And if he was, why was he inspiring me to consume things differently and taste the fifty shades of life?

Mr. Big helps Carrie by buying expensive shoes, and dresses, buying expensive meals at restaurants, and even buying Carrie, her dream penthouse. He even helps her get out of debt. What a gentleman.

Mr. M was pretty much the same, buying our movie tickets, and our drinks, and offering to pay for my travels to visit him in Budapest every month so we could continue our relationship. You might think I was lucky to date such a gentleman, but the truth is much more sordid.

You see, Mr M was the first man I ever dated. I’m bisexual and had only dated women before him, and since this was before the term situationship made its rounds on the internet, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I was naive, inexperienced, and a romantic, much like Carrie at the beginning of the show.

Mr. Big and Mr. M thrive on inexperienced romantic women who have only ever smelled love as a perfume and never tasted it on the tongue of their lovers. They’re usually someone’s first adult love, an obsession-all-consuming kind of love that they don’t ever commit to but you think it’s fine because he’s taking his time.

We couldn’t sleep without talking for hours, he stopped going to the gym to hang out with me instead, we drank wine together over our respective work every night. I thought ‘he loves me’ after he had read my favorite books, ‘he loves me’ I thought once more after he listened to the Taylor Swift playlist I made for him. ‘He loves me,’ I thought when I kissed him goodbye at the train station before we were to meet again in Budapest.

He did not love me. He loved that I was an erratic dreamer, an intellectual writer, but he didn’t love me. I never farted in front of him, because I couldn’t stand to be seen as human around him. ‘I don’t want him to know’ Carrie said, after revealing that she had farted in front of Big, sending her into a spiral.

You see, this type of man in real life doesn’t fall in love with the bisexual, nosering tattooed writer in silk nightgowns who chain smokes. They fall in love with the strawberry-blonde Ralph Lauren-wearing bombshell with a high-power finance job.

He loves the illusion of the writer girl, someone who can intellectually stimulate him and make him rethink everything he held to be true, awaken him to new forms of art, show him cool underground hangout for the poor because he likes to ‘slum it’ on the weekend but during the week it’s cocaine and 20 euros cocktails in Paris. Yes, he had a coke habit and was also a vegan, I did not say Mr. M was perfect, did I?

He was obsessed with the world I was showing him, and I was obsessed with the sophistication he was bringing. But it wasn’t love.

You see one cannot fall in love with an idea. One has to fall in love with someone. I know, as the intellectual who drinks themselves down the bar it’s hard to hear, but you can’t fall in love with a concept. No matter how sexy it is.

Which is why we all outgrow our Mr. Big. We don’t marry him as Carrie does in the films (spoiler alert), our relationship crashes and burns in the messy tangled mess it started in. In the end, we don’t want him, we want what he represents, and eventually, we outgrow him.

This isn’t to say that one cannot fall in love with someone from a higher social class than them, I deeply believe that one can fall in love with anyone.

But the idealism that comes from dating someone like that for the first time is intoxicating. Someone who knows which wine will go with the salmon he’s cooking you tonight, someone with a swanky impersonal apartment and bland musical taste you can elevate.

That isn’t what love is, so we outgrow it, even though the obsession leaves a scar on you and makes you run for the hills every time a guy a little bit similar shows up. Now you know.

How about you, have you met your Mr. Big yet? If not, let this be a warning to you.

From Marseille with Love,

*vapes away*