Did you know that nearly half of Americans say dating is harder now than it was a decade ago? Even though Sex and the City first aired over 25 years ago, its lessons on love, loneliness, and friendship still hit hard today. Out of all the iconic shows set in New York, Friends, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother only Sex and the City earned a reboot. Why? Because it wasn’t just about sex or drinking Cosmopolitans; it captured the complexities of friendship, relationships, and solitude in a way that still feels timeless. What Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha navigated with answering machines and brunch, we now face with dating apps, DMs, and TikTok story times. And just like that, swiping has replaced serendipity but the show’s greatest truth still holds: friendship might be the real soulmate.
On her 35th birthday, Carrie Bradshaw walked into a Manhattan restaurant, dressed up and glowing, ready to meet her closest friends for dinner. Instead, she was met with silence. No one was there. One by one, the women called to say they were stuck in traffic. Carrie sat alone at a table for four. She left with a tiny birthday cake, and on her walk home, it toppled to the ground. The image of her standing there in the street, clutching her ruined cake, is one of the most quietly devastating moments in Sex and the City.
And it might be even more devastating now, in 2025, when so many of us live in a world that is hyper-connected, yet profoundly lonely.
The brilliance of Sex and the City was never just in the fashion or the witty one-liners. It was in its honesty about the messy middle ground of relationships and the courage it took to be single, independent, and sometimes alone in New York City. Watching the series today is like peering through a cultural time capsule, and realizing just how much, and how little, has changed about dating, friendship, and connection.
The Art of Meeting Someone
Rewatching the series, one thing stands out: how often these women were approached in real life. Carrie gets asked out in taxis, Charlotte meets men at gallery openings, Samantha strikes up conversations at bars. A glance, a line, an invitation, that’s how connections began.
Today, men often express interest with nothing more than a string of Instagram hearts, hoping you’ll “get the hint.” Dating apps have made people passive. Why approach a stranger in a bookstore when you can swipe from your couch? Why risk rejection when you can send a DM?
Apps have also fueled what you might call swipe fatigue. There’s always the sense that someone better is just one profile away. That constant searching makes people restless, impatient, and less willing to commit.
Back in Carrie’s day, you had to race home to check your answering machine. You sat by the phone waiting for a call. That waiting built a kind of longing, an anticipation that deepened connection. Now, communication is constant, yet depth feels scarce.
Loneliness in a Noisy World
For all its glamour, Sex and the City never shied away from loneliness. Charlotte famously sighed, “I’ve been dating since I was 15. I’m exhausted. Where is he?” Carrie admitted that being alone on her birthday “really scared” her. Miranda curled up with cartons of Chinese takeout, waiting for calls that never came.
These moments still resonate because loneliness has only intensified. A 2023 survey from Cigna found that 58 percent of Americans feel lonely on a regular basis, with Gen Z and Millennials reporting the highest rates. In a city like New York, dense, bustling, but often isolating, the epidemic feels especially sharp.
The irony is stark. In 2000, loneliness meant silence: no calls, no plans, no partner. In 2025, loneliness is noise: hundreds of notifications, likes, texts, and swipes that somehow fail to fill the void of true intimacy.
Carrie’s answer to loneliness often arrived in the form of shopping, what some call “retail therapy.” A pair of Manolo Blahniks, a piece of vintage Dior, or the rush of leaving Barneys with a new bag became her way of coping, a ritual of self-care that eased heartbreak and quieted anxiety. The show never painted this as shallow indulgence; instead, it suggested that beauty, comfort, and a small sense of control could be found in the chaos of New York. Today, the habit has shifted from Fifth Avenue to our phones, where scrolling online stores and filling digital carts offers the same fleeting relief.
Independence and Its Price
When Miranda bought her own apartment, the man at the title company looked at her paperwork and asked who was co-signing. “Your dad?” he asked. “No,” she replied flatly, “just me.” That moment was revolutionary at the time, a single woman owning property in Manhattan without a husband or father’s financial backing.
Today, women’s independence is more common, but the tension remains. Ambition, financial stability, and self-sufficiency can still intimidate potential partners. Many successful women in New York quietly confess they downplay their achievements when dating.
Miranda’s storyline reminds us that independence often comes at a social cost, but it also comes with freedom. The women of SATC modeled that being single wasn’t a failure. It was a choice, and sometimes the most empowering one.
Brunch vs. Broadcast
Another striking difference between then and now is how dating stories are shared. For Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha, the stage was brunch. They’d arrive with hangovers, anecdotes, and insecurities, laying it all out over plates of eggs, fruit bowls, and the iconic rice pudding. Their storytelling was intimate, unfiltered, and safe within the circle of friendship.
Today, many people broadcast those same stories to thousands of strangers on TikTok and Instagram. Our For You Pages are oversaturated with GRWM (“Get Ready With Me”) clips before a date and “story times” afterward, turning personal vulnerability into consumable content. But it’s hard to be truly invested in something when you don’t know if it’s real and when there’s no reciprocal relationship allowing for genuine connection. When friends confide in us, it feels confidential and intimate. But when the same stories are broadcast online, that closeness is lost. What could have been a moment of connection within a circle of trust becomes just another piece of content in an endless scroll.
It’s a sharp cultural shift. The SATC ladies used humor and friendship as therapy. Today’s digital confessions come with likes, comments, and parasocial bonds, but not necessarily true intimacy. What once stayed at the brunch table now lives forever online.
Never Settling, Then and Now
If there’s one thing Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha never did, it was settled. Time and again, they chose heartbreak over compromise, walking away from men who were “good” but not great. Carrie left relationships that looked stable on paper but lacked passion. Charlotte’s picture-perfect marriage to Trey fell apart not because he wasn’t successful or attractive, but because he lacked vulnerability and emotional stamina, first with impotence, then infertility. Miranda often found that men couldn’t handle her ambition, while Samantha refused to apologize for her independence.
That lesson still resonates in 2025. Many people would rather stay single than commit to someone incompatible, even if that means years on dating apps. Swiping can create resilience, a sharpened sense of what we want and what we refuse to tolerate. But it also feeds our restlessness, keeping us in a constant cycle of seeking the next best thing.
What made the show so layered was how each woman embodied a different way of coping with that in-between space. Carrie masked her disappointments with cynicism, narrating her heartbreak with humor. Miranda became jaded, bracing herself for disappointment before it arrived. Charlotte stayed hopeful, clinging to the belief that love was just around the corner. And Samantha leaned into hyper-independence, proving she didn’t need a man at all.
Together, they captured the emotional spectrum of singlehood. And in truth, most of us cycle through all those modes at different times in our lives, cynical, jaded, hopeful, independent. Sex and the City gave those feelings names and faces, and in doing so, it gave viewers permission to embrace each season without shame.
Friendship as Soulmate
Perhaps the show’s most radical lesson wasn’t about men at all. It was about women choosing each other. In one of the most famous episodes, Charlotte declares, “Maybe we can be each other’s soul mates, and then let men be these great, nice guys to have fun with.”
In 2025, that sentiment feels undeniably true. Many of us rely on hobbies, friendships, solo trips, and pets to fill the void of elusive companionship. In an era of swiping and ghosting, our deepest connections often come from our chosen families rather than romantic ones.
The show’s brunches weren’t just comic relief, they were survival. SATC gave us a model for prioritizing friendship as much as romance, and maybe that’s the antidote to today’s loneliness epidemic.
The Cake Still Falls
Carrie’s cake on the sidewalk is more than a scene. It’s a metaphor for all of us who’ve ever felt alone in a crowded city, whose expectations didn’t match reality, who’ve had to scoop up the pieces and keep moving forward.
The difference is, Carrie had her friends waiting for her at the end of the night. And so do we, if we choose to see them as soul mates instead of consolation prizes.
Technology will keep evolving, apps will keep churning, but the essential truth remains. What SATC taught us and what New Yorkers know best, is that no matter how the rules of dating change, friendship and resilience will always carry us through.
Julia Payan is a licensed esthetician and the founder of Just Be Gold Spa. She writes about lifestyle, beauty, and wellness, with a focus on thoughtful living and self-care.
