Last month, I finished my first full watch-through of Sex and the City, and somewhere between the six seasons of lust, love, wealth, and success, a part of me started to feel like I was doing something wrong. Carrie Bradshaw seemed like the pinnacle of womanhood, perched at her tiny apartment window, tapping away at her keyboard with a cigarette in hand, as she effortlessly balanced her career, her friends, her love life, and her outfits. The visual is intoxicating to say the least. It suggests that we too should be able to excel in our careers, maintain perfect friendships, fall in love, look incredible, stay emotionally stable, cook dinner, do pilates, manage our GPA, and somehow still sleep eight hours a night. It was during this rewatch where I found myself guilty of harboring my own unsustainable delusions of grandeur.
And if anything, Carrie’s partners-in-crime only complicated the portrait of modern womanhood that Sex and the City presented. Charlotte York’s aspirational, searching femininity; Miranda Hobbes’ pragmatism and sharp tailoring; Samantha Jones’ unapologetic eroticism. Together, this group has not only become the pinnacle of female friend groups, but individually have become the blueprint to what defines a woman as successful. They had taste, beauty, glamour, and a polished kind of poise that felt both aspirational and unattainable. And once I recognized this illusion, I couldn’t help but wonder:
Can us women actually have it all?
Sex and the City didn’t just entertain me, but it shaped an entire generation’s expectations of womanhood. It showed us the New York City fantasy of what life could be: weekend brunch with your best friends, a fulfilling career, an Upper East Side apartment, designer clothes, and passionate relationships.
I became immersed in a world where women somehow juggle everything with style and wit and only occasionally fall apart. And yet, here I find myself in a generation of college women subconsciously trying to combine all four archetypes into one overworked, under-rested body. Unlike the SATC girls, it feels like today’s women are expected to be amazing at absolutely everything. Maybe it’s a feminine urge, or an instinctual desire, but regardless of the root, it feels like if we don’t have anything, we’re failures.
If we don’t have a 4.0 GPA, internships lined up since freshman year, a perfect gym routine, glowing skin, impressive extracurriculars, emotional availability, a stable relationship, financial literacy, clean girl aesthetics, and a crazy social life, then it feels like something’s missing. But when I thought about it more and more, I came to realize the show was never actually about having it all. It was about four women trying to figure out what “all” even meant.
Carrie was magnetic, vulnerable, quick-witted, and was painted with a type of chaos that often comes with loving deeply and unwisely. Miranda represented ambition in its purest, least apologetic form. She cared less about love and conventional motherhood, but didn’t wait for permission from anyone to succeed in whatever she deemed fit. Unlike Miranda, Charlotte carried the torch for tradition and romantic idealism, illustrating the sincerity, and sometimes delusion, of wanting a life that looks as lovely as a bridal magazine spread. And Samantha, with her sensual independence and enviable self-assurance, symbolized liberation long before social media turned female empowerment into a buzzword. Individually, each woman showcased one dimension of what it means to be woman, but none offered the full picture.
The reason why Sex and the City is so compelling is because when these four women moved through the city together, they created something more complete than any of their individual arcs. Together, they formed a mosaic of modern femininity that’s flawed, glamorous, contradictory, resilient, and deeply human. I realized that no one woman had it all, but each had something essential, and it was only in their collective orbit that the fantasy of “having it all” even felt possible. In their friendships, the fragmented pieces of womanhood assembled into something whole. In their laughter, their missteps, their honesty, and their unwavering loyalty to one another, they didn’t just portray the lives of women, they mirrored the ways we rely on each other to feel complete.
So, can we have it all?
I would say yes, just not all at once. We can have a life that feels full, joyful, rich, ambitious, soft, romantic, exciting, and stable. Just not under the pressure to be everything everywhere all at once. We can’t have Carrie’s life, or Miranda’s, or Charlotte’s, or Samantha’s, but we can choose the parts that matter to us and build a version of womanhood that actually fits.
Just like every other facet of life, womanhood exists on a spectrum. It’s fluid, shifting, and impossible to pin down to a single definition or expectation. It stretches and bends with us, expanding in some chapters and repenting in others. And maybe that’s the quiet truth I’ve been circling all along: we were never meant to carry every version of womanhood alone. Because in the end, having it all isn’t about achieving some culturally engineered ideal, it’s about choosing which pieces of life actually matter to us, and letting go of the ones that only look good on paper. From this, I’ve found the true fulfillment isn’t in having everything, but in having the courage to want less, and want it deeply.