4 Signs You Have a Chameleon Girlfriend
And why she’s not your soulmate.
You’ve just started going out with this girl, and she is perfect.
She likes what you like, she agrees with your opinions and she’s always up for whatever you feel like doing.
In the beginning, it all sounds great, until something begins to bother you, but you can’t quite put your finger in it — but one day, you finally figure it out: your girlfriend is a chameleon.
A chameleon girlfriend is someone who’s used to changing according to the person she’s with. She aims to please, and finds it much easier to do so by erasing herself and acquiring other people’s traits, which she mimics to perfection.
She’ll mimic your opinions, your preferences, even your style of dressing and presenting yourself.
Here are three signs your “perfect girl” is actually a chameleon girlfriend:
1. She doesn’t hesitate to adopt your likes and dislikes — all of them
This girl likes what you like. The bands you listen to, she loves them. Your favorite movies, she’s seen them all.
If you’re vegan, she’ll go vegan. If your favorite thing to do is to sit down on the bleachers of a baseball game with a hot-dog and a beer, she’ll have some, too. If you like cats better than dogs, she might start looking at adopting a kitten.
If it seems like she doesn’t have a preference that’s genuinely her own, she’s definitely a chameleon.
2. She doesn’t seem to have any opinions of her own
She agrees with everything you say. If she finds out you two disagree on a subject, she quickly backtracks her stance by saying something along the lines of, “I never saw it that way, I guess you’re right.”
Or, “I can change my mind, I don’t feel that strongly about this anyways.”
The problem isn’t that she changes her mind once in a while, but that she molds her opinion to fit yours every single time.
3. You catch her contradicting herself in front of her friends
If this girl is a chameleon, she’s not one only with you — chances are she’s a chameleon around her friends, too.
When you get to meet her friends, you notice she mimics their gestures, their tone and phrasing in ways you’ve never seen her do before. And what’s more: she’ll say things or agree with things in front of her friends that contradict believes she had previously expressed before.
She says she doesn’t like children, but isn’t her friend’s toddler just the best creature in the whole world? She wants to steal little Junior and keep him to herself.
She’ll watch sports with you all Sunday afternoon, but as soon as Stephanie says sports are a waste of time, your chameleon girlfriend simply nods along.
4. She’s always up for “whatever you want to do, babe”
The chameleon girlfriend will push herself to want to do everything you want to do.
She’ll take your restaurant suggestions and even let you order for her. She’ll go
When you ask what she’d like to do on the weekend, her standard answer is, “whatever you want to do, babe.”
In the beginning, it can be fun to date someone who’s always into doing whatever you’d like to do, but in the long run, it can be quite draining to be the one who’s always in charge of making plans.
The chameleon girlfriend isn’t broken, or evil
She’s probably someone with low self-esteem, desperate to be like, who have found a strategy that seems to work for her.
She’s not being manipulative, and she’s not broken, she only needs a bit of support so she starts believing in and valuing herself — her true self, that is.
Why the chameleon girlfriend is not your soulmate
At first, finding a chameleon girlfriend may seem like winning the lottery. Congratulations, you’ve found your soulmate, the one person in the entire world who’s just like you, thinks like you, likes the same things you do.
What more could you possibly ask out of a soulmate?
What you’re experiencing, however, is someone who’s making herself into a copy of you just so you like her better. She’s not genuinely like that, she’s only downplaying true aspects of her personality because somewhere along the way she learned that’s how she gets people to like her.
Falling in love with a chameleon girlfriend is like falling in love with a person who isn’t real.
You’d want your soulmate to be real. With real likes and dislikes, and personality traits that are her own. Yes, you and your soulmate are supposed to have things in common, but you’re not supposed to be essentially the same person, one a mirror image of the other.
First, the very concept of a soulmate is a shaky one, but if we understand a soulmate as the right person for you, then she should complement, not copy you.
And she should have a mind of her own.
