The Girl With Skills

I found a cool post and wanted to pass it on, The Female Equivalent of the Nice Guy: The Girl With Skills. It's interesting and I certainly identify with a lot of his description of The Girl With Skills. Tom-boy? Check. Poker-faced? Check.

Thanks to certain things when I was growing up, like hanging out with the neighbor boy and having to hold my own with his friends while playing war, I developed the habit of out-guying the guys. This was a big part of my experience as a young lass and teen. Interacting with boys was all about being tougher than them, because that was the habit I'd developed. Habits are hard to shake.

These days I'm much more aware of this, and much more aware that it's a bad thing. So, I'm better. When that comment of, "Oh yeah, I bet I could beat you at X" comes to my lips, I recognize it for what it is - self-defense - and quash it. I don't have to prove my butch-ness any more.

These days, when I like a guy, I work really hard to actually show it. I still suck at doing this, but I do rather better now than my previous strategy which was built upon either:
1. Ignoring him
2. Being somehow competitive with him

Because, when we get right down to it, whether we're talking nice guy or girl with skills, there are real reasons these folks struggle with dating.

• Nice Guys tend to be too nice. They're so accommodating that the gal might as well not be dating him 'cause he's got little to add to the relationship - it's all, "I'll do whatever you want to do," which gets old fast.

• Girls With Skills tend to be too demanding. They've driven themselves to work so hard because they feel like anything less makes them less. Thus, the standards they set for a guy tend to be extreme because they expect the guy to either match or exceed her in what she's achieved, and those achievements are specific. So, the wonderful guy who's X instead of Y - like, an artist instead of a lawyer, never has a chance because her scale of "worthy" versus "not" is very specific.
  

I recognize parts of myself in this gal, but I'm glad to say I never matched her exactly. These days, I appreciate the need to resemble her even less. It's not about "settling" or lacking standards, but instead it's about recognizing which standards are important (he's respectful of you) and which are arbitrary (he earns X amount of money).

I've got a list of things I'm looking for in a guy, the Charlie List, and I've thought very hard about what should go on it. Even so, some of them are still negotiable, but overall I feel pretty good that they're necessary, i.e. I just can't be with a guy who lacks confidence. He doesn't have to be confident about everything, I'm sure not, but a guy who's got generally low self esteem doesn't work for me, and I make no apologies about it.