Heartbreak has always been central to storytelling – it’s at the heart of countless songs, movie tear-jerkers, and the six-season HBO show Sex and the City. While many of us continue to debate which SATC characters resemble the friends in our own group, one thing unites us all: we love sharing our dating woes with our friends, no matter how messy or explicit. But there’s a fine line between discussing the plights of your love life alongside chats about work and life and incessantly reeling off stories about your dating escapades.

The constant focus on love easily separates someone like Carrie Bradshaw from someone like Charlotte York – where love is just one star in the constellation of life’s many occurrences. In Carrie’s mind, however, self-worth and identity are tethered to the ebbs and flows of one’s romantic life. She has a chronic tendency to talk about her dating experiences as though they are the defining narrative of her life. She even builds a career discussing her romantic endeavours, consistently flakes on friends to chase men, and brings up her relationship with Big at any opportunity (even if you’ve never seen the show, you’ve likely seen those “Big is moving to Paris” memes).

Many of us know someone with ‘the Carrie complex’. It manifests as a relentless, intrusive pattern of speech, where no matter what life or worldly occurrences happen, the conversation inevitably circles back to a personal experience with love, even in inappropriate circumstances. This fixation on romance leads to neglect in other critical areas of life: because of this, those with a Carrie complex often find themselves stuck in a loop, retelling the same romantic sagas without resolution.

Kay, 22, almost felt “too validated” by her friends when speaking about her romantic endeavours. “I think that’s what kept it going,” she says. “I think obsession is a really valid feeling. I think it’s being delusionally in love with possibility.” During college, she estimates that dating was the central topic of 90 per cent of her conversations. “It’s everything I talked about – everything else sort of fell away,” she says.

During this time, Kay became fixated on three people, which completely derailed her college experience and her grades. “I just started to focus my life around theirs instead of around mine.” She stopped “caring about class and focusing on lectures” and didn’t go to college events. “I would finish my life so that I could then go tend to theirs,” she says. “I fully dived into their lives and their inner worlds, more so than my own.” For her, this meant “not seeing [her] friends as much, not going out to parties, and not doing things in the area where [she] lived.”

23-year-old Sharon says that she remains deeply affected by her first heartbreak and that she still talks about it to this day. “No matter who I’m speaking to or what we’re speaking about, within ten minutes, I’m going to bring up this breakup,” she says. Even past obsessions with a crush meant she found it difficult to concentrate in church and even got suspended from school after writing explicit passages about him on a school computer. She points to society as part of the reason why she became so obsessed with him. “People should be obsessed with love, because look at the fucking world around us,” she says. “If you have a crush, you should be allowed to be ‘batshit’ crazy about it. It’s a good way to pass the time.”

But for Yaneiri, 23, it’s clear that being “batshit crazy” is often what drives friends, like her, away. Yaneiri eventually grew tired of seeing one of her friends develop a Carrie complex, and she wasn’t the only one in their circle who felt this way. “I think all of our other friends started noticing that it was taking over who she was as a person,” she says. This friend would always have chaotic dating stories to tell, “whether she was left on read, her date never showed up, or someone never followed up after a date”.

While she was initially sympathetic, Yaneiri explains this friend would “immerse herself into whoever she was dating” and consequently abandon her friend group, even when they were going through difficulties of their own. Yaneiri and her immediate friend group felt they had no choice but to distance themselves from their Carrie-esque friend. “It really affected our friendship, because we never really got that close to her,” Yaneiri recalls, adding that she never really got a chance to open up to her “as much as [she] did with [her] other friends.”

To reiterate, none of this is to say that speaking about your love life is inherently problematic. As aforementioned, vulnerability is a vital aspect of friendships. Plus, from a young age, girls are fed the narrative that love should be paramount over all else. Childhood crushes are often brushed off as harmless “boy craziness,” while the media sells countless tales of women whose ultimate fulfillment lies in romantic success. For some, this narrative fades as they grow older, replaced by career ambitions, friendships, and other markers of selfhood. For others, however, it lingers. With this in mind, it tracks that some women remain so attached to the thrill of pursuing romance. But when one’s sense of purpose or self-importance hinges entirely on romantic validation, it’s worth pausing to question whether this is a truly healthy approach.

“The less I feel they like me, the more obsessed I am,” Kay reflects, adding that she would often become obsessed with men during periods of heightened stress as a way of distracting herself from the real problems at hand. “Almost all of my romantic relationships have been born out of me trying to avoid stressors in my everyday life.” Like Kay, Sharon realised her obsession with past crushes stemmed from a deep need for validation and insecurity. “I was addicted to the intensity of these kinds of relationships,” she says. “When I was in an unrequited situation, I was very much stuck in a fantasy world.”

Modern dating is equal parts pleasure and pain – a balancing act we willingly engage in, wrapped in the allure of happy suffering. If you’re coupled up, resist patronising your single friends; their so-called chaos might just be the flip side of your luck in dating. And if you’re the single one, try not to dominate every brunch with tales of your latest situationship – unless you’re ready to own your fate as the group’s Carrie.