In comic books, heroes beat up bad guys, stop bullets, and turn into flying pillars of fire. In real life, heroes donate their kidneys to strangers, dash into burning buildings to save kittens, and leap into storm drains to pull out drowning children. So yeah, maybe we do need heroes, just a little but when it comes to our love lives, our hunger to find a hero to save us may be our fatal flaw.
Cry babies
Women have always been perceived as more emotional than men, explains counseling psychologist Anna Maria Mora, and it starts in childhood. "When little boys fall and cry, we tell them they have to take it like a man. But we allow our daughters to cry." Men grow up tough, strong and silent, hiding their emotions. Being heroes even when they'd rather hide their faces in a pillow. "It's what our culture teaches us." The thing about culture, she explains, is that it forms our collective conscience, not necessarily about 'right' and 'wrong', but what maintains order in our society. And even after 49 years of independence, she points out, our culture still holds up the man as the tough one, the fighter, the solver of problems. It still teaches that women are vulnerable and in need of rescuing.
Daddy's girl
"Our daddies hold us when we cry, and say, 'Don't worry, Daddy will fix it.' And while we're growing up, we see daddy solve the problems. Daddy pays the bills. We believe that men will fix everything in our lives."
When this belief follows us into our adult relationships with husbands and lovers, trouble brews. With all of our independence and careers, even though we've moved ahead in terms of our personal growth and understanding our emotional nature, we're still looking for a hero, a knight in shining armour. We continue to turn to men to save us, financially, emotionally and physically. But sometimes, the profile of a hero, as fed to us by myth and media, has a lot in common with the profile of an abuser.
Knights are creatures of war
The man who is 'protective' of us, even using aggression and physical violence to 'rescue' us, is likely to be the same man who sees us as territory to defend...and stake a claim on. A young girl growing up in an abusive home will be grateful to a lover who defends her physically and otherwise, even from her own father, but is unlikely to realise until it's too late that she's recreated a replica of the situation she was trying to escape. In Mora's experience, the incidence of abuse is not only rising, but becoming more prevalent in younger men, as early as their thirties, rather than in the over-50 group, as was the case before. "I heard a man shouting on his phone, giving a woman one 'boof' in front of everyone in the bank, with no sense that he was speaking to another human being. All that is abuse. If you feel as a man that you have to shout at a woman to control her, that kind of relationship is doomed."
When love needs rescuing
An obvious solution, of course, is for a troubled couple to attend counseling, although that may be an easier step for the woman to take than the man. "We gravitate toward a nonjudgmental person who can help us with our emotional hurts. Because the way our men were taught, they will not gravitate towards that kind of thing. It would be perceived that they can't handle their stories." But the man needs to be honest enough to take that step. "He has to say to himself, there's something here that isn't right." And he needs to take the steps to fix it. We also need to understand that it's perfectly okay for a couple to take turns rescuing each other. There will be times when the woman can handle a problem while the man sits back and lets her; at other times, it's the other way around.
It's never 50-50, but we have to work together and understand each other. It all boils down to honesty and self-awareness and, importantly, an awareness of a higher power, whoever we understand that to be. "Both women and men need to say 'I was not created to be unhappy. There is glory somewhere.' It has to do with your faith, faith that we were not created to be abused but to be developed to be our best self to the glory of God." In other words, we were created to be our own heroes. We have the power to rescue ourselves; we just need to find the will, and the way.
