I try to avoid using the words "belief" and "love" in the same sentence, since keeping the two apart can be a real pain the neck. Am I really in love? Or do I just believe I'm in love? What's the difference, anyway? Trying to analyze romantic feelings can be like trying to dress a cranky toddler; it takes an unnatural steadiness to keep from going nuts. 

Two episodes of Sex and the City, however, watched back to back, prompt unavoidable questions about belief and love. "The Man, The Myth, The Viagra," in Season Two, portrays love in the context of myth and fairy tale; Season Five's "Unoriginal Sin" in the context of religion. 

"The Man, The Myth" gets a little sloppy in its terminology when it talks about fairy tales and myths. Technically, a fairy tale is a romantic fantasy in an abstract setting, while a myth is a story, true or false, that is told to convey social ideals of strength, courage and destiny. Both terms, though, have come to bear connotation of "false, foolish story.” In "The Man, The Myth," the discussion of fairy tales is used to scorn the ways women believe fantastic things about men and relationships, leading to the questions: why do we believe what we do? Does it matter to us if it’s fiction?

The heavy-handed fairy tale devices begin as soon as the episode opens with Carrie's narration. "Once upon a second time around, in a mythical land between Carmine and Mulberry streets, two mere mortals were having a wonderful time.” Carrie has just hooked back up with Mr. Big after their Season One-ending breakup, and their hearty evening on the town has her thinking that maybe the man really has changed from the self-absorbed, inattentive boyfriend she broke up with. 

Carrie is in no hurry to try out this theory on her friends Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha when they meet for lunch the next day. Lucky for her, Miranda has the floor. She just had a date with a guy who told her he was divorced, only to take a call on the man's cell phone from his wife. Miranda, a witty and enjoyably cynical character who gives the show the much of its saltiness, feels her bitterness building as she tells her friends.

"Guys are such liars," Miranda says. "He tells me how much he likes me, and boom, I believe him. Am I that needy?" 

Charlotte, the sweet, sometimes naive character with the most traditional and sentimental view of men and relationships, suggests that Miranda's reading of guys is too grim. 

"This married man fell madly in love with my friend Amanda's friend Ashley, and he said he would get a divorce and he did," Charlotte says. "And they got married and they moved to Connecticut, and he is this amazing husband and father."

"Never happened." Miranda says, almost cutting her off. "Urban relationship myth. Unbelievable fairy tales concocted by women to make their love lives better."

Charlotte insists the story is true, but her three world-weary friends say they know better.

"It's right up there with the one about the guy who couldn't commit and the woman broke up with him and moved away to Kansas or something," Miranda says. "And then one night she comes walking home..."

"In the rain," Carrie interjects.

"Always in the rain. He's just standing there in front of her door with an engagement ring and he says, 'Marry me,' and they live happily ever after."

Searching for a witness to her belief that "people do live happily ever after," Charlotte turns to Carrie, and says she has turned over a new leaf with Mr. Big. Carrie struggles to articulate what exactly is different this time around--"Um, maybe we both know that if we came together again it must be for a reason"--but Samantha and Miranda are not impressed.

Cut to Carrie at her computer. "That afternoon I got to thinking about myths and relationships; heroes, boyfriends; cyclops, divorced guys--are they really that different? The primitive Greeks clung desperately to myths to explain the random hopelessness of their miserable lives. Do modern-day singles need modern-day myths to help us get through our random and sometimes miserable relationships? And what about Big and me? ... Had the relationship gods smiled or was that something I desperately needed to believe?" (Cut to her screen for her column's tagline.) "Are we willing to believe anything to date?"

Never mind that the Ancient Greeks were actually advanced and prosperous, not primitive and miserable. Carrie has touched on a crucial point. We rely on myths to give us meaning in life—stories that sum up why we do what we do, what we think life is all about, what we hope will happen. The American myth of social mobility is a classic example. Work hard, get ahead, go from rags to riches. It’s not as though this has never happened--although it is far more rare than we tend to believe. The point is that we are inspired by stories of self-made millionaires to believe that mobility and happiness will come to us through hard work, and go to office day after day with this myth in the back of our minds. Carrie's question gets us thinking: Does it matter to us how reliable these myths are? Should we be worried about our susceptibility to them? When it comes to love, do stories like The Man Who Could Commit After All set us up for crushing blows like the date who pretends to be divorced?

Miranda, still seething over that offense, is reluctant to accept an offer of a drink from Steve, who makes his first appearance in the series as an affable and unpretentious bartender. She does end up taking Steve home for a romp, but has her mind made up that her heart will stay out of it. When Steve asks for her number, she declines. "You don't have to do this," Miranda tells him. "You don't have to make believe you're going to call. Let's just call this what this is: a one night stand."

When Steve comes to her door the next day, asserting that he's genuinely interested in her, Miranda keeps stonewalling. "Translation: I think you're an easy lay and I'd like to have sex again." Some call it cynicism; Miranda, no doubt, would call it realism. But Steve convinces her to let him show up that night at the bar where she is meeting her friends. 

Carrie has convened the gathering in order to bring Big along and wear away her friends’ doubts about the viability of their revived relationship. But more importantly, she wants Big to show an interest in people that are important to her (“In every myth there comes a point where the mere mortals are given a test," Carrie explains). Did we mention that the irony can be heavy-handed in this show? The bar is named Denial. "Denial was a very popular Manhattan nightspot. Apparently, everybody wanted to be in Denial."

But when Carrie goes to Big's apartment that night, he isn't dressed and wants to back out of their plans. "I've been out all day, and it's going to rain," he whines. Carrie, silently furious with him for letting her down again, and with herself for expecting better, storms out. 

Carrie enters Denial (nudge nudge, get it?) to meet Charlotte, Steve, who is being friendly, Miranda, who is being mean to him to protect herself from his charm, and Samantha, who has just lived a pretty tall tale of her own—abbreviating a sexual encounter with a millionaire who was 72 years young and on Viagra. Carrie elects not to report that Big won't show and lies that she doesn't know what's keeping him. ("I couldn't tell my friends he wasn't coming," she says in a voice-over. "I figured as long as I was in Denial may as well stay there." Yuk yuk.) 

Steve can tell what's eating at Miranda and pulls her aside. "Can you for one second believe that maybe I'm not some full-of-shit guy, that maybe I do like you, that maybe the other night was special. Do you think that maybe you could believe that?"

Miranda is played by Cynthia Nixon, who summons some convincing pain in her face and her voice for this scene. "No. Maybe I've slept with too many bartenders." Steve leaves, and Miranda returns to the table, where Carrie suggests they move to a table for four. "I knew it," Miranda says, on the verge of tears. "Big's not coming. Men are shit."

"He's coming, isn't he?" Charlotte demands. "I didn't know if I had the heart to tell Charlotte that happily ever after was just a myth," says Carrie’s voice-over. Cut back to Charlotte, whose innocent face suddenly lights up. "See, there he is!" 

The ending is so transparent as to be self-satirical. The scene goes slo-mo, the music plays, Carrie whips around to see Big coming down the stairs from the entrance. Mr. Insensitive sensed her feelings after all, and came to save the day. Miranda's day, too. "Seeing Big show up like that shook Miranda's lack-of-belief system to the very core," Carrie's voice-over says. Miranda takes off after Steve. 

Cue the rain. Cue one more Denial joke. "Just like that, Miranda left Denial." Miranda, drenched, catches up with Steve down the block and exclaims, "Steve, maybe I can believe it!" They kiss, and the voice-over returns to helpfully identify the scene as one of spiritual transformation: "From that night on, promiscuous women everywhere would tell the tale of the one night stand that turned into a relationship."

Back to the bar, where Carrie and Big are having a high old time with Samantha and Charlotte. "That was the night we stopped being a myth and started becoming real." Cue the credits. Carrie dumps Big again later that season. 

Unoriginal Sin," the second episode of Season Five, is all but a sequel to "The Man, The Myth, The Viagra." Carrie doesn't seem to realize she's reprising her column from Season Two when Samantha reports that she is back with Richard, who cheated on her but she believes is reformed. "How about this for a column: Desperate women who will believe anything," Carrie says. Belief is again the main character, but the fairy tale overtones have been replaced with even less subtle religious ones. And once again, questions of belief tug the hardest at Miranda and Steve, now her ex-boyfriend and father of her baby.

Although the subtlety hasn't improved, Sex and the City has reached new emotional depth by Season Five. Responding to critics complaining of (or merely bored with) the four friends' monotonously blithe lives filled with fancy shoes, constant parties, little work, and casual sex that yields orgasms with implausible consistency, the show's writers threw some serious twists into the lives of the fabulous four. Carrie's broken engagement. Charlotte's divorce. Samantha's struggle to actually have a relationship for once. And of course, Miranda's baby. 

One morning Miranda and Steve are baby-proofing her apartment when he springs an idea for a different kind of protection. He wants to have their son Brady baptized. "It's not about religion, it's not about God. It's just something you do in case"--Steve's voice trails off, but he’s worried about the eternal fate of their child.

Miranda doesn't want a ceremony that will feel like a charade. "What's wrong with little Brady having a little party?" Steve demands. 

"I don't believe in it," Miranda says.

"If you don't believe," Steve points out, "it's just water on the kid's head."

Still saddled with a case of writer's block—a symptom of a relationship drought—Carrie has drinks with two book editors who want to publish a collection of her columns. She just has to pick out her favorites and write and introduction. "You know: what's the message? Is it hopeful? Is Carrie Bradshaw an optimist or a pessimist?" the editors ask. "After all the breakups and the disappointments and the train wrecks, you still believe he's out there, right?" Carrie submits a meek "yes," but secretly she's doing some soul searching, wondering if Charlotte was right to call her cynical at lunch in an earlier scene. "To be honest, I wasn't sure what to believe," she says in a voice-over. "But my cynical side suspected optimism would sell more books."

Cut to Carrie going through a file of her columns. "That night I started thinking about belief. Maybe it's not even advisable to be an optimist after the age of 30. Maybe pessimism is something we have to start applying daily, like moisturizer. Otherwise, how do you bounce back when reality batters your belief system and love does not, as promised, conquer all? Is hope a drug we need to go off of? Or is it keeping us alive?" Cut to her screen for the tagline: "What's the harm in believing?"

Cut to Charlotte in her bathroom, where a tape of a self-help love "expert" dispenses platitudes: "Open yourself, breathe in the possibility of love. What is not love is fear. It's time to let go of fears and embrace your dreams." Charlotte scrawls on her mirror with lipstick: "I believe in love."

Miranda and Steve find a church that will meet their demands for a watered-down baptism, so to speak. In one of my favorite scenes from the series, a classic illustration of our culture's cafeteria approach to religion, Miranda combs the baptism form with a red pen, scratching out the words that fail to suit her.

"I don't want the baby referred to as Catholic. No original sin, no renouncing of Satan. ... In fact, no mention of Satan, the devil ... or hell." Carrie's voice-over delivers a low blow (pardon the expression in this case) that alludes to the current priest scandals: "Miranda was surprised the priest was so flexible. But the truth is, in these troubled times, the Catholic Church is like a desperate 36-year-old single woman, willing to settle for anything it can get."

Later that day Miranda and Carrie shop for a baptismal gown for baby Brady, and the theme of innocence and rebirth is introduced in no uncertain terms. Baptism, Miranda says, is “all about cleansing the baby of his sins, when clearly babies come into this world with a clean slate and we're the ones that fuck 'em up."

The somber observation leads Carrie to confess that her book introduction, prescribed to be a profession of optimism, has only highlighted her crisis of faith. "I don't know what I believe," she says. When Miranda asks Carrie to be Brady's godmother, a giver of spiritual guidance, Carrie's doubts deepen. 

But she's already agreed to go with Charlotte to a seminar led by the self-help love guru from those tapes (“Her philosophy of written affirmations has helped me let go of negative thoughts," Charlotte blathers), in part to have something to fill a column, in part to ease Charlotte's fear that her friend is becoming bitter. But in a memorable scene, Charlotte is the one who ends up voicing her doubts. 

At the seminar, the guru is on auto-pilot, rattling off slogans: "Love will come to you only when you truly believe you deserve it. Love will raise you up. Fear will pull you under. Only love is real." (The scene is reminiscent of Brad Goodman on an early Simpsons episode, preaching pop psych to a captive Springfield audience.) She opens the floor to questions and receives the praise of one woman who says her belief in love, conjured by those tapes, helped her fall in love last week. 

Charlotte calls for the microphone and, voice wavering, gingerly takes to her feet. 

"I'm just wondering how long that woman has been doing her affirmations, because I've been doing mine every day and I want to believe, but nothing's happening and I just don't think it's working, I just don't think it will work for me." 

"I hear fear. I hear doubt," the guru replies. "You have to believe love to receive love. Keep repeating your affirmations and eventually your heart will catch up with your head."

For once, Charlotte won't settle for easy answers. The character, played by Kristin Davis, is usually gratingly giddy, a naive foil for her know-it-all friends' snide quips. But here Davis delivers one of her most gripping performances as an actress, registering hateful despair on her face as she succumbs to tears. 

"That's the thing though. I did find love. I believed that there was someone out there for me. And I met him, finally, and we had a beautiful wedding. And then everything just fell apart. And I'm worried, I'm afraid that he took away my ability to believe. And I hate him for that, because I always believed before, and now I just feel ... lost. I'm trying to put myself out there, but I feel hopeless."

The pathetic guru can only manage: "Maybe you're not really out there. Maybe you're not looking for love in a real way." Carrie grabs the mike and protests, "Believe me, she's out there." The guru looks forlorn for a second, then fakes a smile as the room gets quiet.

Sunday afternoon, just before the baptism, Carrie tries once more to defer her godmother duties. Miranda won't hear of it, and delivers a line of Disney-esque cheesiness. "I don't know if I believe in any of this. But I believe in you."

Carrie for once takes a different kind of babe in her arms, cradling Brady as the priest reads a truly poignant blessing.

"Give him an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to love, and the gift of joy and wonder." Cut to a close-up of the baby's tender face, and Carrie watches as water—"through it, we are reborn," the priest announces—-spills over the baby's head. "I couldn't help but hope," Carrie says in a voice-over, "the water would wash away some of my original cynicism." After Charlotte's confession, it's the episode’s second moment that reaches a depth that was foreign to the series back in Season Two. 

But soon Sentimental Charlotte is back. She rebukes Miranda's insult of Samantha's cheating boyfriend: "I don't know, maybe things will work out between them." Too many guru tapes? Sheer stubborn optimism? Touched by a baptism? We are left to guess.

Same goes for Carrie, who, as planned, takes the optimist route as she finishes her book preparations. "That night, I dedicated my baby, my book, to hopeful single women, And one in particular: my good friend Charlotte, the eternal optimist, who always believes in love." The piano soundtrack finishes the otherwise touching episode with a blandness that suggests it was recorded in a hotel lobby.

Note how the question of belief is framed in "Unoriginal Sin." "What's the harm in believing?" asks Carrie's onscreen tagline. "It's just water on the kid's head," says Steve. Or, as Miranda says later, "One less bath I have to give him." The baptism (which turns out to be unexpectedly meaningful) is approached as an artificial spectacle, which Miranda finds ridiculous even before we meet Steve's mother, drunk and babbling, whose idea it was. 

Water on the kid's head. Idiotic platitudes on a self-help tape. This is the stuff of belief? No wonder the cynicism of Miranda and Carrie rings so true. Jesse Ventura once blurted that religion is a "crutch for the weak-minded," and for most of the episode the question of whether to believe does seem like a matter of having something to lean on. Carrie can't bear to let her long-suffering editors and readers down, and can't bear to let herself indulge in despair. The two belief episodes themselves lean too forcefully on tacked-on endings—Big's slow-motion arrival and Carrie's piano-sprinkled book dedication. 

"The Man, The Myth," at the risk of coming across as manipulative, gets us feeling insecure about what we let ourselves believe, whether desperation is the source of our faith more than truth itself. Then it serves up an ending that winks, "Go ahead. Believe in happy endings anyway." "Unoriginal Sin" at least gives us more ground to stand on. "I believe in you," is Miranda's profession of faith to Carrie, affirming the series' unabashed faith in friendships as women's salvation from the trials of dating and singlehood. And there's the faith in the purity of the human spirit, another American spiritual touchstone, with Miranda's "babies come into this world with a clean slate" line, and the trickle of water down her baby's face that gives Carrie the wish to be washed of her cynicism, to be able to believe again.

Sex and the City never really does, as Poison put it, give us something to believe in. "The Man The Myth" mocks the wishful thinking of hopeless romantics, then tacks on that ending. "Unoriginal Sin" gives us an ill-planned religious ritual and a self-help guru. As we scoff, it asks us if we're being too cynical. The temptation is to resort to sentimentalism out of guilt for our cynicism. This is a shallow solution.

I admit, at times when I doubt my own Christian beliefs, I am tempted to reject cynicism simply for its unpleasantness. But as ugly and dark as doubt can get, I have more than desperate sentimentalism to eventually rein me back in; I have a community and family of believers, the continuity of religious tradition (which is embedded in my life, not hastily utilized as with Miranda), reading and contemplation, the revelation of creation. None of these make an appearance in Sex and the City. 

Instead, Carrie and company inhabit an arid world, a frenetic urban environment where fulfilling intimacy is elusive if not impossible. "Having a relationship," writes Lee Siegel in a review of Sex and the City in The New Republic. "is not the same as being together. Just as an attitude toward labor only hardened into an ideology called Marxism when the worker got cut off from the product of his labor, so erotic bonds only hardened into Relationshipism when people started, for a million familiar reasons, getting cut off from each other. A ‘relationship’ is not to be confused with a union. It is an ongoing argument between two stubbornly sovereign selves about the possibility of a union." Optimism, willpower, desperation—these are about all the women have to give them belief in such a dysfunctional setting. No wonder that self-help guru packed the auditorium for her seminar. 

The worst damage these surroundings can do is to eliminate the possibility of having hope and leave only optimism. Optimism is a vague positive attitude about the future, with little or no justification; hope is, in part, the belief in an extension of an existing pattern. So it is with love. When I married my wife, I did so out of a belief in our love and hope for our future together. My romantic feelings alone—the fact that the sight of her gives me goosebumps—were insufficient for establishing this hope. Only after a few years of dating, of talking, of fighting, of cooperative problem-solving, could I project that we could build a marriage. A marriage would be a natural (though by no means easy) result of this pattern. So I had genuine hope for our mutual future. I’m not trying to downplay the romantic spark, which is significant, but what Sex and the City won’t tell you is that it’s only one ingredient. That’s why there’s a difference between a hopeless romantic and a hopeful romantic.

Back to “The Man, The Myth.” What reason did Carrie have to be not just optimistic but also hopeful about her reunion with Big? What pattern of behavior could she observe and extrapolate into the belief that Big had changed and things would be different this time? Nothing, and so all she could do is lean on the crutch of optimism, a vague and unreliable positive attitude (and she supposes that “modern-day singles need modern-day myths to help us get through our random and sometimes miserable relationships.”) Similarly, what pattern could Charlotte rely on to support the sugary slogans of the self-help guru? Miranda needed to form a pattern of Steve’s kindness and Big’s arrival before she could hope for a relationship. (Interesting side note: does Miranda’s previously observed pattern of disappointing dates justify her belief that men are scum? Isn’t cynicism a belief in the continuity of a different kind of pattern? It is, but I believe that hope is a built-in feature of the human creature, rendering cynicism ultimately intolerable. So we need something to lean on, and in the absence of reason to hope, the Sex and the City characters lean on wobbly optimism.) 

I’m not saying that we can only hope for what is logical to happen next. Extrapolation of a pattern does not mean accurate prediction of it. But the Bible’s operative definition of faith is “being sure of what we hope for,” and without knowing what to hope for, what to be sure of and why, belief is incoherent, indefensible, overly emotional, and inadequate. 

-More about Sex and the City from HBO.com
-Summary of "Unoriginal Sin" from Television Without Pity
-Reflections on romance from my Books&Culture weblog