1. The cool girl is not a person. It is an unattainable standard that women believe they are expected to meet in order to have some sort of chance at finding love.

2. Plenty of girls are cool. Plenty of girls embody the stereotypical aspects of a cool girl, such as loving football or hanging out with the guys or playing beer pong or eating a massive steak. But being the cool girl means more than that – it means you’re expected to either like all of those things or act as if you like them, and more importantly, to follow an unspoken set of rules that include not caring too much, not asking for too much, and not wanting something from a guy that is mildly inconvenient for him.

3. The word cool is arbitrary. It means one thing to you and another thing to me. So when a guy says someone is a “cool girl,” he is basically saying that she embodies, or at least appears to embody, every single trait that he personally deems necessary for a woman to have in order for him to even consider dating her.

4. It is actually impossible to eat a burger and fries every single day and wash it down with a beer or six, all the while maintaining the body of Jessica Alba. Everybody loves treating themselves to a delicious meal now and then, even the thinnest and most in-shape of girls, but believing that there is a person out there who can do this every day, without putting on the pounds, is unrealistic.

5. Believe what you want, but no girl out there loves to have meaningless sexual encounters day after day and then act like it’s not a big deal immediately afterwards. Some people may go through phases where they feel a desire to do this for a period of time, but at the end of the day, having sexual experiences without any kind of human connection will eventually wear on even the coolest of girls.

6. It’s impossible to be chill all the time. Even the sweetest and greatest guy in the world is occasionally going to screw up or say something hurtful or just do something stupid. Girls are human and something is going to upset them at some point.

7. The definition of the cool girl changes every five seconds, based around what the definer is currently into or what stage of life they’re in. If a guy is 21-years-old and in college, his definition of a cool girl could involve a super hot girl who will hook up with him when he texts her at two in the morning, then leave before the sun comes up, and casually wave to him on her walk back from class as if nothing happened. A 27-year-old guy may define it as a girl who knows how to cook him a good meal, can chill out with him and his friends at a bar without interrupting while they watch a game, and will let him come over at eleven o’clock at night and leave for work at the crack of dawn, without ever asking any “What are we?” questions. The cool girl is a definition given by different men at all stages of life, and the definition means nothing because the qualifications are always changing.

8. Everybody’s always cast as a little too something: too loud, too needy, too sleazy, too prude, too intelligent, too opinionated, too dim-witted, too ignorant, too emotional. Most of the time, someone who is coming off as chill and perfect and easygoing and never disgruntled is usually desperately working to hide whatever they think their too something is.

9. The cool girl is not supposed to care – about who she’s dating, about her hobbies, or clothes, or appearance, or other people’s opinions, or being well-liked. She’s not supposed to care about anything; she’s just supposed to be relaxed and unflustered and carefree all the time. But the only people I know who are capable of being free of worry and societal pressure all the time are… babies.

10. Various angry people will comment on the bottom of this article about how I’m insecure and bitter, and that the cool girl actually exists because they are, or they know, the cool girl. There are plenty of girls out there who are awesome and wonderful without needing to be perfectly and flawlessly cool, but people will continue to advocate that there is a girl out there who is hot, funny, sporty, easygoing, unemotional, tomboyish, feminine, independent, sexual, smart, and carefree all at once, all the time. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks, ever; she is impervious to insults or insecurity, always; she doesn’t need commitment from anyone she’s dating, ever. Some will advocate this dream girl until the end, instead of believing that every girl has cool aspects about her while still being human and three-dimensional and in need of human connection.