Sex and the City author: 'In real life, Carrie and Big wouldn't have ended up together'

Sure, Big (Chris Noth) wins Carrie’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) heart in the end, but that doesn’t mean he should have — at least that’s what Candace Bushnell, whose column for the New York Observer was the basis for the Sex and the City book and series, thinks.

In a new interview with The Guardian, Bushnell said, “I think, in real life, Carrie and Big wouldn’t have ended up together.”

After seasons of a tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship between the two — remember that time they cheated on their respective partners with each other? — Big declared his love for Carrie in the series finale. The two feature films that followed went on to show them getting married and weathering more obstacles, like Carrie kissing Aidan during her trip to Abu Dhabi.

The Guardian pointed out that some have criticized the franchise for wrapping up everything so nicely when the show wasn’t about happy endings, though Bushnell defended the choice to give Big and Carrie their moment. “At that point, the TV show had become so big,” she said. “Viewers got so invested in the story line of Carrie and Big that it became a bit like Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett. They had become an iconic couple and women really related to it; they would say ‘I found my Mr. Big’ or ‘I just broke up with my Mr. Big.'”

“It became part of the lexicon,” she continued. “And when people are making a TV show, it’s show business, not show art, so at that point, it was for the audience and we weren’t thinking about what the impact would be 10 years later.”

Read Bushnell’s full interview with The Guardian here.