For a precious millisecond toward the end of the fourth episode of And Just Like That Season 3, I thought Carrie Bradshaw and her third-time-lucky boyfriend Aidan were about to break up. Obviously, my hopes—along with, I suspect, Miranda’s—were swiftly dashed, but my conviction was not. If anything, I knew it more clearly than ever. I. Hate. Aidan. Shaw.
This is the hill I will die on: Aidan is toxic, Aidan has always been toxic. From the moment he first sidled onto our screens in Season 3 of Sex and the City, with his lank hair, tighty-whities, and truly questionable shirts, he gaslit, shamed, and manipulated Carrie, and he’s still doing it on AJLT.
How do I loathe him? Let me count the ways. First, he is passive aggressive. I give you “Time and Punishment,” the seventh episode of SATC Season 4—otherwise known as the “you have to forgive me” episode. Aidan has agreed to get back together with Carrie after ending things when she cheated on him—but not without making her feel utterly terrible in the process. First, he shames her for her morning breath following an (unsolicited!) voicemail from Big. Then there’s the pretty-violent-actually slapping on of a nicotine patch, which he dismisses as “making sure it was on good and tight” when confronted. And there’s also the part where he denies being angry, then follows it up by shouting at her for having gone-off milk (!) in her fridge.
Being cheated on is horrible, sure. It’s okay not to want to forgive it. But if you can’t, then it’s quite simple: don’t get back together with the person who did it to you. You can’t just subject them to constant shaming and guilt-tripping until they break—it’s gaslighting, pure and simple. And this is all before he begins his campaign of performative flirting with a bartender at Scout in order to piss Carrie off. Gross.
There’s also Aidan’s toxic attempts to coerce Carrie into marrying him. When she initially wavers after his proposal, telling him clearly that she needs more time before getting married, Aidan reacts generously. However, by the end of the SAME EPISODE, he’s trying to persuade her to fly to Vegas for a quickie wedding. His sweet nothings include “come on, you’re just scared,” “well, maybe you need to be pushed,” and “I wanna lock this thing down.” And then there’s that old classic: “What’s the big deal? It’s a stupid piece of paper!” Romantic! Why does that stupid piece of paper matter? Because Aidan isn’t proposing out of love for Carrie, he’s proposing to gain a more concrete hold over her. He even admits it with his wheedling: “I want the whole wide world to know that you’re mine.”
Before you say it, I know that Carrie is far from perfect. In fact, she’s frequently awful. “Time and Punishment” is also the “bullshit bagels” episode, in which she launches into a narcissistic rant about Aidan as a defeated Miranda stares back at her from over the rim of her neck brace. She can be selfish, and her rational thinking totally dissolves when Big is around. But she’s open about her flaws, she admits her failures, and so we forgive and even love her for them. Even when she makes the truly terrible decision to invite Big up to Aidan’s country house in “Belles of the Balls,” the men one-up her with a fight so tragic it ends with Carrie screaming, “Stop it! You’re middle-aged!”
Carrie isn’t great, but Aidan is so much worse. I, for one, was delighted to see the back of him after SATC Season 4—aside from a brief jump scare in Season 6 and the disastrous second movie. Alas, AJLT writer and director Michael Patrick King was not quite done with Aidan yet. But whilst many of the original characters have changed beyond recognition in this chaotic spin-off show that fans have come to love/hate, Aidan, sadly, has not. His insistence that he wouldn’t set foot in Carrie’s old apartment because it’s the scene of so much unhappiness from decades ago? Weird. Melodramatic. Juvenile. And totally in character. (It’s not the apartment that’s the problem, Aidan, it’s you.)
But not to worry: Carrie simply sells her home of 25 years because of his insecurites, and buys a cavernous townhouse in Gramercy Park so that they can be together. Except they can’t be together. Because Aidan has remembered he has a gaggle of teenage sons who apparently need 24/7 care in Virginia. At the end of Season 2 of AJLT, he turns up at Carrie’s apartment (so he CAN set foot inside!) and tells her, in the most confusing way possible, that he wants to press mute on their relationship for five years, at which point he hopes to find Carrie waiting for him in exactly the same spot.
So here we find ourselves, in Season 3 of AJLT, watching despondently as Carrie rattles around her enormous, empty house and desperately tries to make sense of a “relationship” with no clear terms. So they aren’t allowed to talk, and yet random phone sex is okay? (I can’t even talk about the phone sex, but it certainly adds weight to my argument.) And he can turn up in New York unannounced, but if she visits—planned!—she has to stay in the guest house? In many ways Carrie only has herself to blame (why does she insist on throwing herself back into dating each of her “great loves” multiple times without ever learning a single lesson?), but to see her ruminating over text messages, and hobbling around Virginia’s gaming zones in heels to impress Aidan’s son Wyatt, feels plain depressing.
It’s why the near break-up being dangled like a carrot in front of us viewers feels so cruel. Who know what’s next? Perhaps Carrie will realize she could do without the drama and go back to dating in the city she loves so much? Perhaps Wyatt will lock her in a basement? Or perhaps this is Aidan’s master plan: seeing how much he can get her to humiliate herself as a punishment for cheating on him decades ago? Regardless, it’s time for an intervention from the girls. Miranda, over to you.