Why It’s OK To Hold Out For A Hero

I was driving along the motorway the other day, with the radio playing, when a familiar song came on. Quite a number of years old now, it’s still instantly recognisable. The song was Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out for a Hero. You know it. I know it. Anyone who was around in the 80’s knows it and there’s probably a whole new generation who knows it as well. But it was the lyrics that got me thinking. 

In the eighties, it wasn’t seen as an unusual take. Bonnie was looking for her hero. She wanted that white knight to come along and rescue her. The strong man, fresh from a fight to sweep her off her feet. Her God. Her Hercules. Her “real man”. We all sang along at the time, and many of us wished for the same thing, wondering along with Bonnie where exactly had all the good men gone?  

Is this still an acceptable stand point to take today? We are feminists. Self sufficient. We earn our own money, and stand on our own two feet. The generations before us burned their bras and pushed their way through the glass ceilings to allow us to “have it all”. So if they did all that, and made all those sacrifices for us, then is it okay for us to still want a man to come along and rescue us? Doesn’t that go against everything they fought for us to have? 

In the 90’s with the advent of girl power and the time of the ladette, no one would have dared admit that what they really wanted was a “man’s man”. It would have been unheard of. The media was telling us it was okay to act like a lad and we didn’t need a man to rescue us. We either didn’t need rescuing, or if we did, we had our girls around us to do the rescuing, thank you very much. 

However over the past few years there has been a real shift change in women’s attitudes to dating, with the rise of feminine and masculine energy and the roles they play in a relationship. Is it still okay to want a hero, even though we don’t want, or need, to be rescued? What is a modern day hero and what does he look like to our modern day heroines? 

A modern day hero, for those of us that want a man to take the lead in our romantic relationship, is a masculine energy man. A good leader, he is the one driving the dating and the relationship. He cherishes his partner’s feelings whilst at the same time recognising that many women nowadays are out-earning the man in their lives. He sees that so many women nowadays are in their masculine energy in their professional lives that they welcome, even desire, a masculine energy man taking the lead in their dating lives and allowing them to let go of control. Masculine and feminine energy is all about polarity. It’s the yin to the yang. Think of it like a magnet. It’s the opposite poles that attract each other, whilst the same poles repel each other. 

Women who come to me for coaching WANT a man to step up and take the lead. They are tired and fed up driving relationships and want a masculine energy man to lead them, allowing them to be in their feminine energy, at least in their romantic lives. 

And that’s ok. We have it all. We fought for it and now we have it, but having it all is also having the freedom to accept and recognise what having it all is for YOU. We make no apologies about what we want in our romantic lives and nor should we. Having it all is asking for what you want, and if what you want is a man that will woo you, romance you, cherish you and make you feel safe, then that is okay. If, like Bonnie sang, you are holding out for your hero, then that’s what you need to do. What is not okay anymore is settling for something less than your very own Happy Ever After.