Good article (spoilers in link). https://www.bustle.com/wellness/sex-and-the-city-toxic-relationship-dynamics

I loved the show in my 20s, but now it really makes me cringe. Good to see someone calling a spade a spade here.

Snippets:

"I grew up watching the original Sex And The City, fantasizing about one day creating a life for myself analogous to Carrie Bradshaw’s glamorous Manhattan one. And just like her, I dated a man like Mr. Big who was a decade older than me, with slicked back hair to boot. Like Big, he was emotionally unavailable and would push me away every time we got “too close.” Their unhealthy relationship — and most of the others portrayed in *Sex And The City***, for that matter — led me to believe that the constant making up and breaking up cycle was just a standard part of being in love, and it took me a long time to learn that it wasn’t.**

"From the beginning of their romance, we see Bradshaw continually being emotionally abused by Big, and yet, she still hangs on to the relationship. When Big tells her that he’s going to relocate to Paris and she offers to move there with him, he just shrugs and says, “I don’t want you to uproot your life and expect anything.” He refuses to introduce Carrie to his mother, calling her his “friend,” when she confronts them together. In other words, Big consistently downplays the seriousness of their relationship to Carrie, creating a dynamic in which she’s always giving, and almost never receiving.

“TV shows can portray a reality wherein a man is ambivalent about a woman, and the woman, through her perseverance, pushes a man through that ambivalence into commitment,” says licensed mental health counselor and psychotherapist Jack Worthy, specializing in relationships and dating. “Seeing an idealized, fictionalized woman encountering the same issue and deploying a strategy of, ‘try harder’ — TV shows and movies didn’t create the phenomenon, rather, they took a phenomenon and made it worse,” he says.