Rescued

The princess in the tower, the one who needed to be rescued, saw the good Prince coming along on his horse. She put her head out of the window and cried ‘Help!’ The Prince, being the good fellow that he was, immediately raced to the aid of the Princess, and the rest is history.

That’s a scene from a fable, written a long time ago. So, it can’t surely apply to today, right? Wrong! In spite of being financially independent, bright, career-oriented, and able to perform six tasks all at the same time, some girls wait for their knight in shining armour all their lives. They don’t plan this strategy necessarily; not at all. It is ingrained. It is in their DNA.

My husband has been trying to train me to be more responsible for my emotional distress. When upset, he wants me to do my best to sort things out for myself. I believe the expression he used was that he wanted to try “leaving me out in the left field” to see if I could “meet him half way”. That must sound reasonable – meet him half way.

The problem is that when a submissive girl like me is emotionally distressed, she can’t walk ten feet ahead of her, let alone meet the man “half way”. How can she walk towards him when she is in a bark canoe paddling downstream with no paddle?

What can she do? Nothing. What must he do? Rescue her.

All the training in the world and all the punishment in the world is not going to change a thing. When the girl is locked in her tower, she must be saved. He must find the ladder, climb up to her, comfort her and help her to climb down.
This evening, my husband finally accepted the impossibility of his command. When distressed, I need him to come and help me down the ladder. I’ll climb down out of the Tower once I know that he is there to help me.

To get me down the ladder he may need to be very forceful and stern. I might be afraid of heights and he might have to insist that I must follow and that I *will* be all right. He might need to give me a hug to reassure me that he is there and he won’t ever let me fall. It might be a bit of carrot and stick, but knowing that he came for me is the strength I need to overcome my fear of heights and climb on down to safety.

Some things are set in stone. The submissive woman needs her dominant man. No matter how much he might like her to self-soothe her way out of emotional distress, wanting that outcome won’t necessarily make it happen. She might be submissive, but she can’t do what she can’t do.

And, she can’t do it alone. She needs her man to come to her and rescue her. Nothing on that score is going to change; not tomorrow, not next year, not ever.

I think he knows that now. I feel so very much better.