Because if I ask for something, if I tell you what I want, if I make you come to my part of town,

if I text you first, I could be perceived as over the top, too much work.

One of the most common mistakes that people make when they want more with someone is playing it too cool.

Have you ever played it too cool not asking for things, not wanting to be demanding, not wanting to

pester someone because you're worried that if you do, you will lose your value in their eyes.

That your value comes from being chill, indifferent, easy, convenient, and that if you were suddenly to start asking for what you actually want,

that person would leave.

There's the famous monologue in the movie Gong Girl where she is talking about what it is to be a cool girl.

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl.

Being the cool girl means I'm a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves three sums and anal sex,

and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gangbang, while somehow maintaining a size two, because cool girls are above all hot, hot and understanding.

Cool girls never get angry, they only smile in a trigrand, loving manner, and let their men do whatever they want.

Go ahead, shit on me, I don't mind, I'm the cool girl.

Now that monologue struck a chord for good reason, because it really explained the feeling of so many women about the impossibility of what they needed to be and represent, which is everything.

I need to be everything, all of the time. Not only do I need to be everything all of the time, but I need to ask for nothing in return.

What that monologue does very, very well is it shows the utter imbalance at the extreme of giving everything, being everything, providing everything, and getting nothing for it, just being this sort of vessel to be used for the juice to be wrung out of with the guy not having to do anything to earn that.

And it's that part of it that I want to pick up on, because I actually believe that real life, real relationships are much more hopeful, because there is this hidden secret to attraction psychology that is not revealed in that monologue.

Now I think that there is this perceived safety in being, I don't want to just say the cool girl could be the cool guy.

For anyone who is going into dating with an insecurity that they are not enough, or that they have to try to hold on to someone, they have to try to prove their value.

Anyone in that situation is susceptible to slipping into the cool girl or the cool guy mask, because it is a mask, because we don't feel that cool really.

We do care more than we let on, we do want more than we're telling someone we want, and things are pissing us off and upsetting us more than we're actually saying.

But it's a mask that we put on, because we think that that's what someone wants.

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