Photo: Patrick McMullan
“I do not pick the wrong guys. They pick me,” Candace Bushnell famously wrote in her “Sex and the City” column, which ran in theNew York Observerin the ’90s and inspired the eponymous hit book and show.
“The city was telling me to leave,” Bushnell tells PEOPLE of her decision to move back to her home state of Connecticut after nearly three decades in New York City. “Part of it was because I didn’t want to be living in my old apartment where I lived with my husband and the dog.”
But facing a new life alone for the first time didn’t shake Bushnell. In fact, she truly embraced being single for the first time.
“I wasn’t ready to start dating. But most of all, I didn’t want to,” Bushnell writes in her book. “I’d been in relationships for nearly thirty-five years. I’d even experienced the full relationship cycle— fall in love, get married, and get divorced.”
She continues: “It was time to put an end to the cycle. And so I decided for the first time in thirty-four years to be man-free. This also meant being sex-free. At this point in my life, I’m not a casual sex person.”
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InIs There Still Sex in the City?,Bushnell explores dilemmas like the “Unintended Cub Situation,” which is when men in their 20s go after older women, and the “Mona Lisa” surgery, which promises to restore a woman’s vagina.
“I wanted to call the bookMiddle-Aged Madness,”Bushnell told PEOPLE last year for the book’s cover reveal. “You have to understand that in the past nobody thought that 50-something people would need to go on dating apps and take their clothes off in front of strangers. Nobody ever thinks that that’s what their 50s are going to look like.”
“People who have kids, they have the luxury of always being able to say, ‘Well, I’m here for my kids.'” Bushnell explains. “Whereas, if you don’t have kids, you’ve got to work a little bit harder.”
And Bushnell’s boyfriend of two years, Jim Coleman, is happy to join her as she explores the possibilities of her sixties.
Jim Coleman and Candace Bushnell.Gonzalo Marroquin/Patrick McMullan via Getty
“I actually met [Jim] through Chris Noth,” Bushnell says. (Noth famously starred as Carrie Bradshaw’s love interest, Mr. Big, inSex in the City.) “He always seemed like an interesting, intelligent man. And I always thought, ‘I’d like to get to know this guy better.'”
Bushnell describes Coleman as kind and romantic. He always brings her fruit in the morning to make sure she has breakfast. When they aren’t spend time together in New York City or in their respective houses in the Hamptons, they’re traveling the globe.
Even though she’s in a happy relationship, Bushnell doesn’t want her readers to wait for love. She didn’t.
“Don’t wait. If you want to buy an apartment or something like that, don’t put those things off until you find the perfect person,” Bushnell advises. “The important thing is to have a life.”
Is There Still Sex in the City?is on sale now.
source: people.com
