Could you forgive someone who jilted you?

After hearing this week that filming has started on a second Sex and the City movie I decided last night to revisit the first movie, which I haven't watched since it came out last year.

I came to Sex and the City late. For some reason I only watched a couple of episodes while it was on TV. Or more accurately, and totally coincidentally, I watched the same episode twice, in which the girls discuss anal sex in the back of a cab. It wasn't until I came out of a long-term relationship about four years ago that I succumbed to the show's charms, watching all six seasons pretty much back to back over a month or so. Trust me, binging on Sex and the City is a great antidote to the break up from hell.

Like just about every other 30-something chick in the western world I fell for the heady mix of friendship, fashion, in-your-face sex (and romance) talk and New York city, surely the most fabulous city in the world. And like just about every other 30-something chick in the western world I went to see the Sex and the City movie at the cinema when it came out. I can't in all honesty say that I loved the movie - it wasn't on a par with the early series for example - but I did enjoy it. Revisiting some of Carrie's WTF clothing choices - the tutu, the dinner plate-sized rose brooch, the bare legs and open toed stilettos in the middle of a Manhattan winter - was lots of fun.

What I had problems with was the whole "he jilts her at the altar, she takes him back" storyline. Yes, it made for great viewing but honestly, would you take back someone who'd humiliated you so completely and publicly? I don't think that I could.

Many years ago an ex of mine proposed to the girl he started going out with after me. (Or possibly while he was going out with me - the timing was a little hazy but to be honest I didn't care much by that stage.) A few weeks before the wedding, with the reception booked and paid for, the dress hanging in the bride's wardrobe and the RSVPs flooding in, he gets seriously cold feet and says something to the effect of, "I can't do it. I don't want to get married. I'm calling the wedding off". Cue devastation, recriminations, tears etc... (This story was told to me by a mutual friend; I wasn't actually there, obviously.)

Remarkably, after the presents have been returned and the dust settles, the jilted bride decides that she can forgive him for cancelling their wedding at the last minute and moves back in with him. A year later he proposes again, presumably accompanying the engagement ring with some pretty extravagant promises that he will actually go through with the wedding this time.

Not surprisingly, her parents, who'd forked out for the first aborted wedding, much of it non-refundable, don't want anything to do with the second attempt, so the couple sets about planning a much smaller event. So far, so good...

A week out from the wedding the glowing bride travels interstate for her hen's night. Left in Sydney on his own our groom obviously does some soul searching and sure enough, he calls his fiance and then, when he can't get hold of her on her mobile, calls her mother and says, actually, no, he can't go through with it, the wedding's off. Again.

Last thing I heard, the bride was debating whether to go back to him for a second time. It sounds crazy for her to even contemplate it after being jilted twice but the poor girl couldn't get past the fact that she "loved him"... I only met her once but I genuinely do hope that she did find a way to get past that in the end and found someone worthy of her love.

As for Sex and the City, if I'd been one of the screenwriters, I would have been tempted to add a scene where Carrie fills Big's curtain rails with prawn heads or scrawls "spineless twat" on the side of his car in Chanel nail polish. At the very least I would have had Samantha give Carrie a good shake if she'd even thought of taking him back. But where would that have left the sequel?