When people talk about the aspects of Sex and the City that were unrealistic, they tend to focus on how Carrie wouldn’t be able to afford her designer-shoe lifestyle as a freelance writer. But perhaps it’s the overarching theme of the show—that a woman’s girlfriends are her true soul mates—that was the most fantastical. Girls, which has often been described (by critics, mostly) as a rawer and more authentic version of SatC, dismantled that notion about female friendships as a myth in last night’s season finale. Instead, the darker, lamer truth of girlfriends was presented: we ignore each other and couple off because we’d rather be with our boyfriends.
Hannah may not have moved to NYC because believed that a writer could have a life of fabulousness, as some idiots did. But she did seem to fall for the promise that her relationship with her girlfriends would be—and should be—the most important in her life. At least, according to the sole sentence of her novel:
A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance…
If that was the premise of her book, it was no wonder why she was having such a difficult time working on it. This whole season was about how the friendships between the four women completely unraveled. They’d actually abandoned one another.
But everyone was complicit in that dissolution, because even when Marnie went by Hannah’s place to check on her, Hannah hid, and turned only to Jessa, the one that she knew wouldn’t be there for her. Or maybe talking ourselves into thinking that we’ve been abandoned by our girlfriends makes it easier for us to turn to the men in our lives, because that’s what we really want. Still, nothing about what Marnie or Jessa or Shoshanna have done ever was grander or more dramatic than Adam running shirtless through the streets of Brooklyn to save Hannah from herself.
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