Being cheated on is horrible, sure. It’s okay not to want to forgive it. But if you can’t, then it’s quite simple: don’t get back together with the person who did it to you. You can’t just subject them to constant shaming and guilt-tripping until they break—it’s gaslighting, pure and simple. And this is all before he begins his campaign of performative flirting with a bartender at Scout in order to piss Carrie off. Gross.
There’s also Aidan’s toxic attempts to coerce Carrie into marrying him. When she initially wavers after his proposal, telling him clearly that she needs more time before getting married, Aidan reacts generously. However, by the end of the SAME EPISODE, he’s trying to persuade her to fly to Vegas for a quickie wedding. His sweet nothings include “come on, you’re just scared,” “well, maybe you need to be pushed,” and “I wanna lock this thing down.” And then there’s that old classic: “What’s the big deal? It’s a stupid piece of paper!” Romantic! Why does that stupid piece of paper matter? Because Aidan isn’t proposing out of love for Carrie, he’s proposing to gain a more concrete hold over her. He even admits it with his wheedling: “I want the whole wide world to know that you’re mine.”
Before you say it, I know that Carrie is far from perfect. In fact, she’s frequently awful. “Time and Punishment” is also the “bullshit bagels” episode, in which she launches into a narcissistic rant about Aidan as a defeated Miranda stares back at her from over the rim of her neck brace. She can be selfish, and her rational thinking totally dissolves when Big is around. But she’s open about her flaws, she admits her failures, and so we forgive and even love her for them. Even when she makes the truly terrible decision to invite Big up to Aidan’s country house in “Belles of the Balls,” the men one-up her with a fight so tragic it ends with Carrie screaming, “Stop it! You’re middle-aged!”
Carrie isn’t great, but Aidan is so much worse. I, for one, was delighted to see the back of him after SATC Season 4—aside from a brief jump scare in Season 6 and the disastrous second movie. Alas, AJLT writer and director Michael Patrick King was not quite done with Aidan yet. But whilst many of the original characters have changed beyond recognition in this chaotic spin-off show that fans have come to love/hate, Aidan, sadly, has not. His insistence that he wouldn’t set foot in Carrie’s old apartment because it’s the scene of so much unhappiness from decades ago? Weird. Melodramatic. Juvenile. And totally in character. (It’s not the apartment that’s the problem, Aidan, it’s you.)