“She was a great girl. We had a great time and there was no future attached to it. And there was never intended to be. I never was deceptive. I never said I loved her.”
We likely will never know how much of Ron Galotti’s relationship with Candace Bushnell is directly reflected in the characters Mr. Big and Carrie Bradshaw, from the cable television series “Sex and the City.”
The direct quote above from Galotti was pulled from the July 3, 2025 New York Times profile, “Mr. Big Is Alive and Well and Married in Vermont.” Combined with our analysis of the Clearer Thinking Gender Continuum Test survey, it helps us place real humans in real situations, so we can think about how to improve the love, sex and relationships we all want for ourselves.
Before we explore some of those scenarios and personas, let’s ground ourselves in the knowledge again from our Aug. 10 discussion about men, women and sex.
Analyzing the nearly 1,000 Gender Continuum Test respondents, we discovered that approximately 53 percent of men have a higher sex focused score (greater than or equal to 1.5 on a scale of -3 to +3). The mean average sex focused score for men was 1.1. Meanwhile, the average woman had a -0.3 score for the same trait, and only 20 percent of female respondents scored 1.5 or higher.
These scores were based on how test respondents agreed with two statements:
I often have sexual thoughts when I meet an attractive looking person.
I do not think about sex that often.
I know. I know. It looks like a Homer Simpson “Doh” moment.
But it actually isn’t.
The Gender Continuum Test examined 18 traits in total. It’s like opening a door to human complexity and nuance – though we still have to choose to cross over that threshold if we’re going to try to understand human nature and pursue change.
This is the heart of mindfulness:
being fully present to what arises
seeing its patterns without clinging or aversion, and
responding with compassion rather than judgment.
One important clarification: “non-judgment” does not mean ignoring the potential of someone doing harm to themselves or others. It means meeting life without anger or attachment and choosing responses that reduce suffering and increase well-being.123
(Oh shit. He’s using footnotes now!)
With that knowledge, we can finally begin to explore who we are, and why we do what we do. If we determine that our reactions and actions do not serve our own flourishing and the flourishing of others, we can choose to change.
To make this fun and more interesting, I tried to build out a portrait of what people like Galotti and Bushnell would look like based on the 18 traits of “sex focused” males and females found in the Clearer Thinking research.
But before we get into that, please indulge this personal appeal.
Males and females do not reside on separate planets like Venus and Mars. We are all earthlings. The trouble men and women face loving and communicating with each other is mostly caused by the way we are differently socialized.
Mindful Masculinity is about ending that suffering by helping people see this truth and use their ability to change.
Most influencers I see online are peddling garbage science and are more than happy to drive a wedge of suffering between men and women – especially since it helps them attract millions of monthly views. They know digital algorithms play to their manipulative false extremes.
These influencers are shaping a dangerous gender narrative that harms men and women because it is the basis for their lucrative careers.
I need your financial contribution to help turn back this tsunami of intentional misery.
Upgrading to a Paid Subscription or making a one-time or annual pledge helps me build the assets I need to promote a kind of healthy masculinity that brings men and women closer together through compassion and understanding, versus tribalism and bitterness.
Another way you can help is by sharing this essay on Substack, Facebook, wherever you have a digital footprint, asking more like-minded people to join our community. There is tremendous strength in numbers.
And by all means, add your thoughts to the discussion. And if you have data you would like me to analyze, please message me and we can talk.
Done. Let’s put Carrie and Mr. Big on Clearer Thinking’s therapist couch and see what we can learn about men, women, and maybe even ourselves.
To perform this hypothetical analysis, I’ve sourced a range of publicly available content about Galotti, Bushnell and some “Sex and the City” episodes, dialogue and scenes.
I included the New York Times piece cited above, as well as Bushnell’s New York Magazine essay from earlier this summer. I also pulled this April 2004 New York Magazine Galotti profile, “Goodbye Mr. Big,” and I read a bunch of Bushnell’s New York Observer Sex and the City columns for color.
Before we go any further, let me be completely clear: I am not personally assessing Ron Galotti or Candace Bushnell. That would require their direct participation.
Instead, what follows is an illustrative exercise, taking behaviors and attitudes described by Bushnell and Galotti and mapping them against patterns in Clearer Thinking’s 1,000-respondent dataset. What we arrive at are character sketches – say for an HBO television series about dating, love, and sex in New York City. Just annotated with statistics.
The Clearer Thinking findings give us a data-informed backdrop. The quotes give us color. The combination gives us insight into why certain male/female dynamics feel so maddeningly predictable.
Are we good? Great. Let’s free associate.
Big man on campus
First, let’s look at someone who lives a life like Ron Galotti has. Based on what I can read about Galotti and inferring some more from what Bushnell felt about his 18 traits, I project a person like him would score at the high end of sex focused – ≥ 2.0.
Galotti/Mr. Big embodies the high cluster male almost to stereotype: He chases after models, engages in aggressive career moves and is thick skinned.
In “Goodbye, Mr. Big, Bushnell called Galotti “one of those New York guys with a big personality — you just notice him as soon as he walks in the room. I called him Mr. Big because he was like a big man on campus.”
Incorporating this and other qualitative information, we find a classic male archetype: high Self-Valuing, high Risk-Taking, maybe high Unusual (commanding, larger-than-life), but low Compassion, low Unselfishness, low Emotional Awareness.
Which in a radar chart might look like this:
This chart shows that being sex-focused has minimal impact on overall male mean scores for the other 17 traits. We can see a little more warmth and compassion in the more sex focused personas. But that’s about the only significant difference.
This chart also reminds us to not underestimate how different individuals can be, even though they share a single strong trait like being sex focused.
I created three overlapping bell curve charts below to demonstrate how varying levels of trait differences impact personality overlap.
So, small differences, like those between Mr. Big and say Charlotte’s Harry Goldenblatt leaves two men sharing much of the same personality — like the chart on the left represents. But Carrie and her girlfriends would never struggle to notice the differences between Big and Miranda’s boyfriend Stephen Brady — like the chart on the right.
“Hello Lover”
At the same time, women like Carrie Bradshaw map close to female averages.
She has a much stronger libido, is more risk-taking, aesthetic and self-defending, but otherwise, we see few major differences between her and most of the women in the Clearer Thinking dataset we analyzed.
Bushnell’s description of how she first grew attracted to Galotti doesn’t just reflect the personality of men like him — it reflects on a classic female attraction style, cues that fit a pattern we saw in my essay “No hair? No abs? No problem.”
Research shows that a sizable share of women are prone to becoming intoxicated by high Self-Valuing, high Risk-Taking male energy. Unfortunately, the same qualities that make a “Big” man magnetic, put a woman at risk of being emotionally stranded later on.
Understanding your personality traits and practicing mindfulness can help a woman (or a man) make smarter choices at the beginning of a relationship, because you know where your vulnerabilities lie.
What this means for relationships
There’s something about how Ron Galotti describes his memories with Candace Bushnell that just rubs me the wrong way. I know that both of these individuals were big kids, adults responsible for their own words and actions. Still…
“We had a great time and there was no future attached to it. I never was deceptive. I never said I loved her.”
He frames the relationship around the “great time” they had. While I don’t’ think Carrie would ever permit an orgasm gap, I detect a power imbalance Candace/Carrie struggled to manage, a disparity that a Bigger Man would have protected her from.
The imbalance of these two profiles finally gets briefly flipped in Episode 19 of SATC’s 6th season, when Big tries to win Carrie back after she leaves for Paris with the beguiling Aleksandr Petrovsky. Carrie upbraids Big for his on-again-off-again affection.
Big: “No, no. Look, I came here to tell you something. I made a mistake. You and I…”
Carrie: “You and I, nothing! You cannot do this to me again. You cannot jerk me around.”
Big: “Carrie, listen. It is different this time.”
Carrie: “Oh, it's never different. It's six years of never being different.”
As much as Candace/Carrie professes her fierce, financial and sexual independence, there’s always an undercurrent of the basic human desire to be loved, without conditions, restrictions and contradictions, that pulls her back into dangerous waters.
In one interview, Bushnell describes how invested she was in her relationship with Galotti by speaking about her reaction after their breakup (which was followed quickly by his engagement to Lisa Wilcox, a former U.S. downhill-skiing champion).
“I really was crazy about him,” she told More Magazine in July 2003. “I think I lost eight pounds.”
Call me old-fashioned, but a mindful gentleman knows who he is – and acts accordingly. He’s protective of a woman’s emotions, especially one who shows him she loves him. He never allows a woman to become emotionally invested if he knows he can’t reciprocate.
No matter how good the sex is.
This is what it means to be fully present, to be seeing patterns and responding with compassion.
Instead of off-loading responsibility for Candace’s feelings strictly on her, an emotionally aware and compassionate man would think:
“This is not casual for her. She is not playing at love – she is in it. If I cannot return this love, compassion requires me to protect her, not exploit her.”
And from honesty would come a clear, kind, and timely conversation.
“I care about you, I value what we have, but if you are going to feel this way about me, then we have to call this off. The longer you invest in us emotionally, the more it is going to hurt when we inevitably end this.”
That sequence — presence, recognition, honesty, compassionate clarity — would not have erased the sting of a breakup. But it could have transformed a heartbreak that led to Bushnell losing eight pounds.
Mindful endings preserve dignity. Selfish and self-valued endings compound injury.
Women don’t complain about shitty men because all or most men are shitty. They complain because too many average men often do shitty things.
The best way to preserve someone’s dignity is to keep an eye on the patterns appearing on your behavior radar.
For someone like Bushnell, this means recognizing early when attraction is attached to a partner’s low emotional availability.
For someone like Galotti, this means realizing your strong sex focus and low emotional intelligence can lead to relationships absent of love. Depending on the other person’s identity, you could place them in emotional jeopardy.
Sex and the City wrapped up six seasons with a happy ending. Carrie returns to New York from Paris, realizing a future with Petrovsky would be a bad choice.
In times like these, good men help good women find a safe place to land, even if that place isn’t in his bed. He does this, because he’s spent time understanding where he sits on the Gender Continuum, and has adjusted his behavior for the benefit of himself and others around him.
That’s Mindful Masculinity.
Footnotes
Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10). In The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, trans. Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995). Defines mindfulness as observing body, feelings, mind, and mental objects “ardent, clearly knowing, and mindful, free from covetousness and grief for the world.”
Bhikkhu Bodhi. “What Does Mindfulness Really Mean? A Canonical Perspective.” Bodhi Monastery, 2011. Argues that mindfulness (sati) is not “bare attention” but must be paired with right view and right effort to discern wholesome from unwholesome states.
Thích Nhất Hạnh. Peace Is Every Step (New York: Bantam, 1991). Teaches that mindfulness keeps us “deeply in touch with what is happening within and around us, and we respond appropriately,” grounding non-judgment in compassion and ethical responsibility.