GODSTUFF

“SEX AND THE CITY”: A LOVE LETTER TO OUR GIRLFRIENDS

In the end, it wasn’t about the sex. Or the Manolo Blahniks. Or men with nice buns, bank accounts or bubbes.

For the ladies of “Sex and the City,” there was but a single item listed on the bottom line: love.

Not with the men of their dreams, but with each other.

Thousands of single 20-something women arrive in New York City every year in search of two things — “labels and love,” Carrie Bradshaw says near the beginning of the “Sex and the City” movie, which opened earlier this week and which I had the pleasure of watching, at 10:30 a.m. Friday, with three dozen other souls in a movie theater in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood.

“Year after year, my single girlfriends were my salvation,” Carrie says.

I know the feeling. I have three girlfriends from college — Kelley, Kathy and Melinda — who have been among the very closest people to me for 20 years. We live in different cities now (New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Santa Clara), which makes getting together for lunch a challenge. Nevertheless, through bad hairstyles and bad men, career changes and children, illnesses and identity crises, no matter what storm howled, our friendship has been a safe harbor.

While we’re not quite Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte — though most of the time among us there are two brunettes, a redhead and some shade of a blond — their bond, though fictitious and slightly more fabulous, mirrors our own.

There were a lot of things about the “Sex and the City” series and its big-screen adaptation that required a broad suspension of disbelief. How a free-lance columnist who wrote once a week could afford a closet full of $525 apiece designer shoes and racks of haute couture and how any of them could throw back as many chick-tinis and still remain a sample size or smaller, to name a few.

What always rang true to me and many of my lady friends was the friendship between the four lead characters.

Those women are us.

That true love is what’s drawing us to the multiplexes in droves.

In life, lovers might come and go, and so will some friends who, perhaps, are meant only for a season and not a lifetime. True friendship, like true love, is rare and precious.

As I watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte clack across the movie screen in their high heels and impossible outfits, their time-tested relationship reminded me of a verse of scripture from the book of Proverbs that says (with my gender-tweaked paraphrase): A person with many friends may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a sister.

Earlier in the week, I spent some time with a new book with similar, if unexpected, themes, to the “SATC” movie. He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir of Finding Faith, Hope and Happily Ever After is a surprising work by Trish Ryan, a 30-something New England writer and avid “SATC” fan.

Ryan’s delightful, sometimes bawdy spiritual memoir chronicles her lifelong pursuit of a soul mate. The path is long and messy, as it is for most of us, and Ryan discovers, in addition to the man-shaped hole, she also has a God-shaped hole.

“What I love about ‘Sex and the City’ is that it shows how messy [that search] is,” Ryan told me, reminding me of a passage in her book about a debauched summer she spent with a boyfriend in Montreal. “I was so desperate for female companionship that I went out and rented ‘Sex and the City’ DVDs, just for some girl time. I was with this guy who was falling out of love with me and all his male friends who hated women. And ‘Sex and the City’ sort of saved me.”

Giving away the end of Ryan’s book would be as criminal as telling you whether Carrie and Big wind up together forever. So I won’t give too much plot away. I will say that, 50 pages into Ryan’s book, I sent an e-mail to Kelley, Kathy and Melinda, urging them to run out and buy the book.

The scene that clinched it reminded me so much of my trio of friends that I found myself reading through tears. Ryan is trapped in an abusive nightmare of a first marriage. She needs to escape but doesn’t know how, she sobs to her best friend, Kristen, by phone one night.

The next morning, a FedEx package arrives for Ryan with the keys to Kristen’s summer house in Connecticut and a check for $1,000. “That was the day I decided to run away,” she writes. And she does.

“I would do it for them. They would do it for me,” Ryan says. “Giving everything you possibly can to save your friend, and you really can’t save each other, but you can help out.”

I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, my girls would do anything for me, and I for them. That’s the kind of friendship we have. That’s the kind of love we share, the same kind of love and friendship that is the emotional anchor — the soul, if you will — of “Sex and the City.”

Or as Carrie’s personal assistant (played by Chicago’s own Jennifer Hudson) says in a pivotal scene in the movie: “Love is the thing, you know.”