Sex and the City

“You have to start the training from day one,” said Britta. “I didn’t know that I wanted to marry my husband at the beginning. I only knew that I wanted him, and I would do whatever it took to get him. And I knew I would.

“You can

’t be like these stupid girls who only want to marry rich guys,” she continued. “You have to be a bit calculating. You always have to expect more than you have. Take Barry [her husband]. As much as he hated it, he didn’t want a typical girl who would let him do whatever he wanted. If someone got him now, they’d be so lucky. He’s smart, sweet, he cooks and cleans. And you know what? He hated it every step of the way.”

Before Barry, Britta was the kind of woman who once made her date go to the coat check to get her a pack of cigarettes and ran out the back door with someone else while he wasn’t looking. “I once called Barry from the top of a mountain in Aspen and cussed him out for ten minutes because he had another date for New Year’s Eve. Of course, it was only a month after we’d met, but still.”

After that, Barry pretty much came around, except for two slightly sticky problems. He liked to look at other women, and he sometimes complained about not having his space, especially after she moved in with him. “Well, first of all, I always made sure we had lots of fun,” says Britta. “I cooked. We both gained thirty pounds. We got drunk together. We watched each other get drunk. We took care of each other when we puked.

“You have to do unexpected things. Like one time he came home and there were candles all over the place and I served him up a TV dinner. Then I used to make him put on some of my clothes. But you’ve got to watch these men all the time. I’m sorry, but they spend 80 percent of their time away from you. When they’re with you, they can pay attention. Why should they be checking out some other chick when they’re eating with you? One time, when Barry’s eyes were wandering, I hit him over the head so hard he nearly fell off his chair. I told him, ‘Put your tongue back in your mouth and your tail between your legs and finish your dinner.’”

Keeping him, however, is another story. “Women in this town don’t care if a guy is married or engaged,” Britta said. “They’ll still go after him. You have to be on top of it all the time.”

Sometimes Mr. Big seems to retreat into himself, and then there is only the surface Mr. Big. Friendly to everyone. Maybe affable is the word. Always perfectly turned out. White cuffs. Gold cufflinks. Matching suspenders (though he almost never takes his jacket off). It isn’t easy when he’s in that mode. Carrie wasn’t always good with people she thought were too conservative. She wasn’t used to it. She was used to everybody being drunk and doing drugs (or not doing them). Mr. Big got mad when Carrie said outrageous things like, “I’m not wearing any underwear,” even though she was. And Carrie thought Mr. Big was too friendly to other women, especially models. They’d be out and a photographer would say, “Do you mind?” and then motion for Mr. Big to have his picture taken with some model, and it was insulting. One time a model sat on his lap, and Carrie turned and said, “Gotta go,” with a really pissed-off look on her face.

“Hey, come on,” Mr. Big said.

Carrie looked at the model, “Excuse me, but you’re sitting on my boyfriend’s lap.”

“Resting. Just resting,” the model said. “There’s a big difference.”

“You have to learn how to deal with this,” Mr. Big said.

COMPARISON SHOPPING

Rebecca, thirty-nine, a journalist who got married last year, recalls a moment when she found another woman’s phone number jumbled among her banker boyfriend’s business cards.

“I called the number, and asked the bitch point-blank what was up,” Rebecca said. Sure enough, the woman revealed that Rebecca’s boyfriend had asked her out to dinner. “I hit the roof. I didn’t scream at her, but I became like something out of one of those nighttime soap operas. I actually told her to keep her hands off and not to call him again. She said, ‘You’ve got a great one there, you should be nice to him.’ I said, ‘Well, if he’s so great, how come he called you when he’s living with me?’

“Then I called him. He had the nerve to be livid with me for ‘interfering in his private business.’ I said, ‘Get one thing straight, buddy. When you’re going out with me, there is no private business.’ Still, for about two days afterward, I thought we were finished. Then we got over it, and he asked me to marry him about three months later.”

There are other methods. After Lisa had been seeing her future husband, Robert, for two months, he started to get squirmy.

“What do you think if I go out with other people?” he asked.

“I think you should do comparison shopping,” Lisa said, supercoolly. “How else can you possibly appreciate me? I’m not a jailer.”

That really blew him away.

“It’s all about self-esteem,” Lisa said. “Men have to feel that there are limits and you’re not going to take anything.”

One well-known problem is living with a guy before you’re married, and then he doesn’t do anything about asking you to marry him. This can be taken care of with dispatch. “Just heard a story,” said Trudie. “Woman, living with guy for a year. One morning, she wakes up. ‘Are we going to get married?’ Guy says no. She says, ‘Move out right now.’ He asks her to marry him that weekend.”

“One of the biggest mistakes women make is that they don’t discuss marriage from the beginning,” said Lisa.

I SHOULD LEAVE

I can’t take it, Carrie thinks, waking up one morning. She lies there, watching Mr. Big until he opens his eyes. Instead of kissing her, he gets up to go to the bathroom. That’s it, she thinks.

When he comes back to bed, she says, “Listen, I’ve been thinking.”

“Yeah?” says Mr. Big.

“If you’re not totally in love with me and crazy about me, and if you don’t think I’m the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in your life, then I think I should leave.”

“Uh huh,” says Mr. Big.

“Really, it’s no problem.”