Sex and the City as Your Personal Matchmaking Tool

Maybe if you have a man in your life right now you have an urge to take him out to a particular new movie. Maybe he would understand you better if he did.
At first, he won't. It's Sex and the City, and that is a franchise said to be for women and only women...

...unless he also understands the personalities of the characters and how they connect to each other with greater or lesser bonds.

I got more tweets from annoyed men this weekend - before they enter the theatre - than at any other time I can remember (granted, Twitter hasn't been around for more than even a couple television sweeps.) These guys are getting dragged to the film, but when they come out they are not so annoyed anymore. Dare I say, they feel honored to the same degree women feel sisterhood over the phenomena?

It deftly balances the needs and desires of the genders, and offers an encyclopedia of translation between their languages.

While women find confirmation of what they always knew to be true about themselves, I am also a supporter of men learning a lifetime of information from this series.

Just as there are solid lessons in understanding how personality style factors into the dramatic choices of the characters, there are also wonderfully drawn scenes that depict the relative gender instincts of men and women. Some of our conflicts and misunderstandings arise because what it feels like to be a woman is different from how a man feels about himself, but they also come about due to simple degrees of (in) compatibility in personality.

Femininity, masculinity, personality, character and maturity all matter in finding a comfortable mate. In fact, combining the television series and these films give us fodder to look at nearly everything that goes on between a man and woman in romance.

KWML and Personality Styles

KWML is a method of personality assessment, friendship compatibility and romantic fitness that you can learn about at www.kwml.com.

I'm going to start this off right away by giving you an immediate key to watching the series and films spawned of it. I promise it will give you plenty of lessons and food for thought on meeting, dating, and running relationships with men.

Here is the key code to translating everything in that drama:

LOVERS

Lovers are emotionally nurturing, "motherly" people - regardless of gender - and are also more on the creative, imaginative, multitasking side in intellectual style.

The main characterof SATC is Carrie. She is a writer, into fashion more than anyone she knows, and the love of her life is "Mr. Big," whose real name is John Preston.

Carrie is a Lover in my KWML system and Mr. Big is a Warrior. A Warrior is a person of either gender who is the opposite - a hard-driving, confident, outgoing, goal-oriented detail person. More of a "fatherly" person.

Women can obviously be hard-driving, confident, and even take "fatherly roles" yet still be quite feminine in the sense of gender.

Carrie's ex-flame is named Aiden Shaw, and he is ALSO a Lover. (hint: which is why their relationship never worked out.) Yet men can be both nurturing people in style of personality, and still masculine in gender. (Which is why they still have a spark of sexual attraction only: masculinity attracts femininity.)

In the end you'll find that dating or entering a committed relationship with someone of your very same personality style can work, but only with heavy labor on the bond, and plenty of outside friendships, supporters and activities.

It's for an obvious reason: if we all come to relationships both to give and receive, then when faced with outside stresses on us, nothing pays off quite like diversity.

We need to be a team as a couple, and this word is a trigger for males to know that they know they've found the right woman.

Tell us you are "committed to the team."

QUEENS

Next comes Charlotte, who is now a married homemaker but who used to be single and the director of an art dealership. She is married to Harry, who is a Magician to her Queen. He's also a funny, entertaining attorney.

As a Queen, Charlotte has something in common with the Carries of the world - she is also a very nurturing, motherly person (vividly illustrated in her challenges in that very role - mom to some pretty unruly kids.) And yet unlike Carrie, she is less of the artistic bent, and far more into the planning and details of life.

A Queen (or King, depending on gender) and Lover have a wonderful intellectual diversity - making for great conversation and conception of new ideas, but when big challenges come along, they might look in each other's eyes and both be shivering in their shoes.

It then might be of very little solace that they are doing so with "togetherness." Nothing's worse than seeing Carrie and Aiden - two Lover personalities - wringing their hands together about the consequences of potential infidelity.

In those times, it's great to have a Miranda (a Warrior) in your life to take the reins and put a stop to an adventure gone south.

Charlotte's husband Harry brings their marriage balance as her opposite - a Magician type. His bright side in kind being that he is the type of husband who can really go with the flow of life and not let much get under his skin. His freewheeling spirit makes it an easy choice for her to leave everything on a girl's-week-out to the desert resort of the Middle East, but that same uber-sociable side gives her obsessive pause about whether he has eyes for their bodacious Irish nanny.

WARRIORS

The sometimes odd-woman-out is Miranda Hobbes, an attorney who's on the uptight side but always saves the skins of her three girlfriends, and she is a Warrior female married now to a Lover type male named Steve. He's a kind, sensitive guy who cries easily and takes a lot of teasing and insults from his wife and other women. (hint: this is never good for the marriage, as fit for teasing as this personality in a male can appear.)

She knows she loves Steve for a reason though, even if he often makes her roll her eyes at him: it's that they are a perfect team of diversity and complementary opposites of personality.

When she needs to chill out - and quit her obnoxiously misogynistic boss before there's nothing left of her soul - Steve is the perfect supportive, tender coach to cheer her on. When he has needed to get his career act in gear in times past (as a bartender), she is the perfect woman to give him a kick in the pants.

MAGICIANS

And finally, the Prima Donna of all Prima Donnas is Samantha. She is a publicist with an incredible libido - one who goes through men like a shark through blood. She is a Magician personality and her ex-flame is Smith Jerrod, a gentlemanly model who is now a movie star thanks to her.

He is a King of course.

A Magician like Samantha or Harry is an outgoing, confident, creative person of either gender. They are people who like the Warriors, are at ease in taking a "fatherly role" or duties in leadership outside the home, out on the town, out in society, and out in the world. They aren't about the details of life though - it's all about adventure, celebration, socializing, and public performance.

Their opposites, the Kings and Queens (like Charlotte and Smith Jerrod) are the sage, patient advisors to their impulsivity, and the supporters who calm them down in the midst of a chaos that needs to be made sense of.

This was certainly the case in the television series when Smith was a loyal supporter through Samantha's battle with cancer. And in kind, her wild ways of publicity resulted in, as he says, "Making him the man he is today. Couldn't have become a star without her..."

There is so much about this movie and the tv show that it originated from that I can't begin to even list the lessons.

One thing's for sure, though. We always want the main character, Carrie, to win.

OPPOSITES ATTRACT AND DIVERSITY SAVES THE DAY

Diversity is crucial on a team and a must in a marriage that lasts. In this little tool (which can be applied to SATC, or any drama with richly drawn characters), you have a set of principles to get a little more active in being your own best matchmaker. Queens (or Kings) and Warriors make the best-rounded partners of personality style, as do Lovers and Warriors.

We've seen Carrie go through the tv series with Aiden (a Lover), Berger (a King), and a host of other men who are never quite her complementary opposite.

In the latest film, two years into the marriage she has always wanted, even her's - the fantasy of millions of women - can hit the skids.

Now that's realism.

I once had a professor of surgery who would say, "It's not what you do... It's what you do next that counts."

Which is all that matters in the real and imperfect world of real relationships.

Carrie's intuitive sense that the right man for her all along was also her most challenging and opposite in style - Mr. Big, the Warrior personality - because they both had to grow enough of the traits of the other over the years to meet half-way. To mature through their shared diversity.

Some fun and practical tools to this end are free to mull over at www.kwml.com.

When we find that challenge to embrace diversity within the couple, appreciate, enjoy, and even love our differences, there's always space to make mistakes, disagree, and not ever have to be perfectionist about "what we do."

Temptations, miscommunications, insecurities, jealousy, a struggle for balance between jobs and kids and what we used to see as the love of a lifetime - now just a big headache - all our imperfections.

With our complementary opposite mate in terms of personality, we can take time apart like Big and Carrie, contemplate the lessons - whether on the adventure of a vacation getaway, in the safety of a NYC studio apartment, or in the everyday homes the rest of us live in on Main Street.

Then return, quick to forgive and be forgiven because of our well-rounded strengths as a couple. We know that in "what we do next," we are not spectators or bystanders, but a romantic team with authority and interdependence only made possible as teammates.

And to turn the words of Mignon McLaughlin end on end, "In the arithmetic of love, two minus one is nothing, and one plus one is everything."