The "Cool Girl" Paradox

(Author’s Note: this read would pair nicely with a glass of chilled white wine and Olivia Rodrigo’s SNL performance of “begged.”)

It’s another restless night. I’m home for the summer, meaning I feel like I’m awaiting my death sentence. I’m confined in my enclosure with its pool-blue walls and too-stuffed drawers that don’t hold enough space for both of my lives. It’s like they were always meant to be separate: adolescence and adulthood. I’m thinking about loneliness which is something I often deem a “winter problem,” like it’s as seasonal as peppermint is to coffee. My loneliness feels numbing and excruciating at the same time. It’s an incurable disease I’ve only ever briefly found the antidote for. I almost believe people can see it radiating from me and fear if they stand too close to me, they’ll feel it too—pulled into a whirlpool of navy melancholy.

I’ve also been thinking about my relationship with love, as I so often do.

Dating now is different from dating then. By this, I mean there’s a stark contrast between dating before and after heartbreak. My heart has darkened from scarlet to indigo, stripped of the naivety it once possessed. I think about early days when the one I love would absolve all of life’s many worries. I remember thanking the stars above for aligning and placing me in a universe where the two of us met and fell in love. I also remember my first breakup, when I felt a grief so strong I couldn’t stifle my sobs as I sat on the bathroom floor telling myself that life goes on, even though, at that moment, I wished it wouldn’t. Loving and having love reciprocated is its own wonder of the world. It’s so terrible that I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy, yet it’s so glorious that I pray everyone experiences it at least once.

After this experience, I learned that my love is to be given to someone who deserves it. This, I’ve discovered, is the most challenging of all. I’ve long resented the assurance that I must undergo a personality transplant to finally become wanted. And yet. I’m not a person who feels nothing, and I so often feel like the world wants me to apologize for that fact. It wants me to play coy, detach, be hard to get, kiss a stranger in a bar and forget the guy who’s plagued the forefront of my mind. I’ve always been a girl who is a lover of love, inconveniencing myself with a smile on my face.

My relationship with love is ever-evolving. My parents have said that relationships are different now, which I always nod in agreement to but I also don’t really know how they were. Maybe we just meet on social media instead of a bar and have new names for the same old phenomena. I’ve considered my own patterns of love—the misgivings I’ve harbored that served as nothing more than a premonition of the anguish to come.

My flair for theatrics has left me playing new roles in each relationship, one thing remaining fixed: I will be so chill, chic, and cool. I will abide by the oath of don’t ask, don’t tell. I’ve been the joker, the fool, the lover. I become a chameleon of sorts, changing my color to best complement his palette. I won’t wait for you to ask how my day is. I won’t notice a day passing with my text unanswered. I won’t ask where you spent the night. I won’t expect you to read my writing. I won’t anticipate you to act like I exist outside of your boredom fix.

The paradox with this cycle is that it always begins with men who appear promising. They have morals, they fulfill their civil duty, their future isn’t aimless, they normally discuss the ghosts of love’s past with just the right amount of angst and bitterness, they read for pleasure, they initially appear eagerly interested—something that dwindles as my investment grows. Oftentimes, the moment I reach for the hands of men who have extended theirs to me, they pull back. For the last couple of years, I’ve found myself in the same toxic sequence of begging for the attention of a guy barely interested. I quietly beg—so hushed, as if to not disrupt them—but it haunts my mind. I apologize to my friends for my repeated rambles and anticipate sleep because that’s the only time I’m freed of it.

I gleefully feast on the trail of breadcrumbs that dust his path. I commit fully to a life devoid of love but full of shots of dopamine. I begin to feel like I’m burdening him with every new detail I reveal about myself as he sits there—twiddling his thumbs—bored and vacant. Loving me becomes an imposition—as tedious as laundry and grocery shopping.

I never sever the limb when I should. I bleed out slowly, awaiting a tourniquet from the one holding the knife. I avoid clarity—reveling in uncertainty until I’m writhing on the brink of insanity—and grasp what’s left, as if a blanket from childhood that I know I should discard but just can’t. I don’t want to see evidence that I’m easily disposable, just as I always believed, so I linger in silence hoping for reassurance that’ll never come. I hope for him to have an epiphany. I pray the optimism of my pipe dream oozes enough false hope to fuel the both of us, but I soon understand it’s nothing more than a mirage. I imagine myself clinging to his ankles as he exits my landmine. But really, I just say I understand.

I curse my early twenties and the agony that accompanies it. I comfort myself in the best way possible, faulty half-baked conviction, repeating that one day it won’t always be like this: an affirmation I will repeat like my life depends on it.

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