What is 'Sex in the City' Actually About? Friendship - not Sex

I am probably the only female in America who didn't see a single episode of the hit television series, "Sex in the City" when it was on HBO. But a few years after it ended I saw the movie, the first one. I enjoyed it, so the next year I caught some of the reruns of the TV show on cable. But I missed how the series ended, so I bought the last season on video and watched it all in a weekend. (In all fairness, my husband was out of the country, not only for that weekend, but for the eighteen months after that weekend too.)

SITC became a companion to me during that time. I saw the entire series three times in the course of that contract. All this is to say that, I might have come late to the party, but I have ended up getting to know the characters of this show extremely well.

From the title of the series, you could easily make the mistake of thinking it was about sex. But you'd be wrong. What it is actually about is relationships and not between men and women but between women. It should have been called "Friendships in the City," but something tells me HBO wouldn't have had a hit on their hands with that title. And we probably wouldn't still be watching the reruns twenty years later.

I'm one of four friends who've been together since junior high. I've written about this gaggle of girls in one of my first hubs. I also have two other female friends (do we have male friends - sorry - material for a different hub) who I may even be closer to than these four. But the dynamic of being part of a "group friendship" is a different experience altogether. Someone is always available. In a crisis, it's all hands on deck. You pull together even though it is very likely that if it had just been any two of you trying to be friends, it might not have stood the test of time. The interconnectivity of the foursome sometimes brings people into an intimate relationship who would never have ended up even as friends on their own. Case in point: Samantha and Charlotte in the show. Can you see them talking over their problems at a table for only two? It wouldn't have ever happened.

In the television show and movie, the four women live near each other. (Sam has her adventure in Hollywood, but she eventually returns.) With my foursome, I was usually the one living far away during my Army wife decades. But for the past 20 years we've all been within an easy drive of each other. With retirement staring us in the face, the unthinkable has happened. One of us remarried and moved to South Carolina. One finally was free of shared custody with an abusive father and fled to Florida with her son. And one sold everything and is about to move to Ireland to be near her daughter and grandchild-to-come. All these changes have happened within the past year.

Am I worried about my connection to these life-long friends? Do I fear I'll loose touch with them and no longer know or be concerned about their daily lives? Not even a little bit. We live in a world of Facebook and SKYPE. I'll still hear their jokes, see pix of their pets, and share words of inspiration. All things considered, we have it easy. If we had to depend on the pony express, we'd surely die strangers.

I have no doubt I'm taking these changes so stoically because I have the comfort of my two other close friends who are staying put. Still, I'm not about to write off my own foursome of friends. No, not Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha. I may not have the designer clothes, or the gallery openings, or the fashionable restaurants to keep me going. (Or the new every week, hot dates - but come to think of it, all those Sex in the City gals ended on with just one man by the close of the TV series.)

But I do have the thing the series was really all about:

Friendships that stand the test of time.