Are Carrie & Aidan Over For Good On And Just Like That?

Twenty-five years after Carrie and Aidan first met on Sex and the City, the polarizing couple might be over — for real, this time.

In the July 24 episode of And Just Like That Season 3, long-running tensions between the pair come to a head after Aidan interrogates Carrie’s handsome writer neighbor, Duncan, even though she previously asked him not to. Then, Aidan attempts to crash Carrie and Duncan’s writing session by pressing her to break for dinner — and when she gets home late, he tells her to stop snuggling and take a shower to wash away the scent of Duncan’s pipe.

Obviously, it’s not really about the smoke. The next morning, Carrie confronts Aidan about his interference and realizes he still has trust issues stemming from her affair with Mr. Big. It culminates in a tense conversation on a city sidewalk, where Carrie argues: “How is it possible that I haven’t earned your trust by now? I have done everything to show you how fully committed I am to you ... I have agreed to arrangements that even you yourself couldn’t live up to. I was 100% in.”

When Aidan questions her speaking in the past tense, she confirms: She was all in. She’s not anymore. “I can’t give you any more than I have, and it wasn’t enough,” she says, adding that Aidan’s family situation hasn’t helped matters.

Aidan says he needs 100%, and Carrie says the same.

A Musical Message

“I really thought we were gonna make it this time,” Aidan says. The pair share a hug when (just in case you weren’t sure they were really done) Taylor Swift’s “How Did It End?” begins playing. The devastating Tortured Poets Department track is all about the end of a relationship that just couldn’t work out.

And its lyrics — which play over a montage of Carrie taking down her postcards from Aidan, cuddling Shoe, and going for a girls night out — lend an air of finality to Carrie and Aidan: “Our maladies were such we could not cure them, and so a touch that was my birthright became foreign,” Swift sings.

Or as Carrie (ever the tortured poet) puts it in the voiceover from her book at the end of the episode, “The woman had thought that she and her love were very present, but now realized they were still locked in the past — which meant, of course, that they had no future.”

Old Habits

Despite the harrowing breakup, the final scene is a hopeful one, and Carrie reuniting with her friends evokes the first time she and Aidan split outside of Charlotte’s wedding, when she turned to the girls for comfort. “It’s hard to find people who will love you no matter what,” she said at the time. “I was lucky enough to find three of them.”

A Peek Ahead

Fans have long made predictions about Carrie’s love life based on pre-season production photos, so it only makes sense to turn to good-old Getty Images for a hint about what comes next here, too. But interestingly, the most recent filming photos with Sarah Jessica Parker and John Corbett are of their breakup conversation.

It’s certainly possible that Aidan returns in some capacity, of course. But if you’re Team Anyone-But-Aidan, there’s reason to be hopeful that this may very well be The End.