I think that the challenges around this whole cool girl thing are that people view that the opposite of the cool girl is somebody who’s needy, demanding, and neurotic, that the person who is not cool is showing their hand and giving away all their power, that by showing your interest in someone, it’s over, they won’t be interested in you. There’s a middle ground here, and I’ll get to that in a moment, but the challenges that this idea of dating and relationship rules, the whole idea of the cool girl, keep it cool paradigms, literally cement the dynamics of a narcissistic relationship before you can say “love bomb.”
At the core of the cool girl paradigm is the idea that the person, the girl, can just go along and be easy and not at all be demanding. “You don’t want to communicate with me? That’s cool, yeah, I got a life.” You might find yourself thinking and saying things like, “You want to have dinner with your ex on your own? Yeah, that’s cool. I’m an open person.” You want to go out for drinks with that person who posts lots of thirst trap pictures and is texting and DMing you late at night? Yeah, that’s cool. I’m not even going to ask if this person doesn’t know that I’m your partner because I’m cool, and that’s what a cool girl does, right? We don’t ask because it’s cool to not ask. “Oh, you don’t post pictures of me on your social media? That’s cool. It’s okay that other people don’t know that we are together, even though you tell me that this is a committed relationship. But I’m cool. It’s cool. Social media is fake. It doesn’t matter to me that people think that you’re single because I’m cool.” That’s how this whole cool girl thing works. Like I said, it’s narcissism chum.
So, the assumption is that being cool means power, right? It’s this sort of false indifference, and let’s face it, in a way, indifference is power. It’s akin to the idea that the best negotiation tool is the willingness to walk away from the table. But it’s also walking right into the narcissistic person’s trap. To be cool really means that you don’t voice needs, you don’t voice wants or concerns or discomforts. It means that you may ignore your own physical somatic responses because you want to seem cool, as though cool people would never have trauma responses. So, you don’t bring anything up, and the narcissistic person certainly is not going to have empathy for you and think, “Oh, maybe me going out with the thirst trap to talk about work will make my partner uncomfortable.” No, no, no. They will never think that. Their entitlement and their lack of empathy mean that they aren’t even thinking about you. But, my cool friend, if the tables were turned, if you were to go have drinks with that attractive person who is helping you with a work thing, oh my, oh my, oh my, the hypocritical hell you would have to pay. You would be called every name in the book, branded everything you could imagine, and they’d probably end the relationship with you.
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