It’s not like we haven’t heard the stories or know the description — Gillian Flynn‘s book “Gone Girl” paints an accurate portrait in one well-written monologue. Tove Lo sings about the nonchalant attitude in her song “Cool Girl.” No matter how hard we try to escape it, women in heterosexual relationships are taxed by the notion that for men to like them, they should strive to be the “cool girl.” The cool girl is emotionless, caught somewhere between not caring at all and only caring when it matters, and most importantly, is 100 percent a fantasy.
No where else does it feel more apparent than in college. The cool girl is supposed to be chill and down for anything, and rolls with all of the punches. The cool girl fits right into the holes that hookup culture creates — she emphasizes a lack of caring, a lack of emotions, an overall casualness of it all. She is everything and nothing at all — existing only in the minds of those that project onto her.
I know her too well — last year I had pursued a boy who wanted nothing more than a cool girl. I changed myself to fit this description. After we had ended things for the first time, I became strategic with what I could and couldn’t say. I felt like I no longer could talk to him truthfully, or else he’d run away again. Attempting to be the cool girl has taxed me beyond words.
I wanted to impress him, and in an attempt to not push him away after the infamous “I think you’re too attached,” I tried to be everything he could want. Except that everything he could want boiled down to a whole lot of nothing — stripping myself of the substance that made me who I was so I could fit the description of what he wanted me to be.
I didn’t challenge his politics, or lack thereof. I didn’t try to reach out and connect with him or attempt to bruise his ego through clever squabs. I became passive. I tried to never step out of line, never tried to tell him how I felt about the situation. We only talked when it was late. We talked sometimes while I was abroad, but it was never anything that held substance — it felt like two people who didn’t know each other were trying to find some commonality, trying to hold onto the versions of each other we thought we knew.
When we saw one another over the summer, each of us was a person that the other didn’t recognize. We were tired — possibly of pretending, possibly of each other. We weren’t the people we started as, and I was no longer everything he could want. I didn’t feel like the person that I used to be. Breaking through the fantasy had almost broke me, and I had to walk away from everything that I couldn’t be.
When someone projects their fantasy onto you, they’ll let you know when you’ve stepped out of that fantasy. This usually happens when you show any form of emotion, have an opinion or disagree with a statement previously untouched. Cool girls aren’t supposed to speak out, aren’t supposed to feel emotions, or stray too far from their description. When a cool girl stops being a cool girl, she becomes the emotional one, or worse — the crazy one. Once those labels falls upon someone, it’s hard to break from them.
Projecting a fantasy onto someone else is unhealthy. Believing that someone is more than they are, placing them into a box, invalidating their emotions because they aren’t “supposed” to feel them, can lead to hurt and disappointment. Sometimes we want to believe things about people even though they aren’t true. To confine people to a singular trope or stereotype is to ignore the facets of their personality that make them different. This extends beyond just the cool girl stereotype, and extends into the dangers of all kinds of projection.
We have to be careful with what we think about and project upon other people. Relationships should strive to change the people in them for the better. Placing someone into a box and willing them to change works against this. Believing that anyone could fit into the trope we put them in — be it cool girl or otherwise — is dangerous, and it changes who they are.
Meredith loves telling stories and pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw, minus the man and comfy NYC apartment. She, however, eats enough brunch to cover all six seasons. When she's not drowning in 16th-century literature, she can be found lamenting over the bad grammar and bad boys in her middle school diary.
Find her on twitter @merewilsh or email her mwilsher@bu.edu with all your love musings or questions.
