It’s rather difficult to envision a powerful, smart and intelligent young female professor to be such feminine, soft and gentle wife at home. We would have expected strong and brilliant career-women who have much say at work amongst her colleagues at their level or who are taking the role as the commander to fall and have admiration for someone. The guys whom they are interested to spend their lives with must be extremely extraordinary great, huh? Well, most likely not at all, to most of us. Why? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

My supervisor is a very smart, talented and young professor in Medicine. She really stands out of her counterparts; especially the majority of the crowd is male physicians and scientists, some of whom are even a lot older than her. When I first joined her laboratory, I’ve heard a lot of positive remarks about her fantastic career she has built. She has certainly earned much respect from me, not only her excellent scientific knowledge but also her superb skill in human relationship. At that time, I only knew that she’s married with three small children. It did surprise me a little that she’s one of those few successful career women who manage to put in equal amount of effort and time to maintain a happy family. Then I was also thinking, “Wow, her husband must be a very smart man who also shares equivalent or even higher success in his career than her.” But my first acquaintance of him proofed my surmise wrong. Ok, I didn’t mean that my supervisor’s husband was not doing well in his career or was a not-so-intelligent person. In fact he has a great track of education record. He is an engineer. He is a quiet and shy person, unlike his wife who chairs meeting in front of all male counterparts. He turned out to be very different than I thought. Anyway, I could see that my supervisor admires her husband a lot and doesn’t feel that he’s not as successful as her in career- wise at all. I’ve even heard her mentioning certain good qualities of her husband with an admiration expression on her face.

I have some guy friends who are married. I am friends of their wives too. And to be honest, I don’t find these guy friends that great to be husband/bf. Ok, I don’t mean that they are not nice guys. They are indeed nice friends and nice guys too. But I just don’t admire them in the romantic feeling. In another words, I don’t feel that they are my hero. However, when I hang out with their wives, I can obviously sense and feel from their words and gestures of how they admire their husbands, their heroes.

When I was a little child, I really admired my dad a lot though he’s always busy with his work and he hardly spent time with his children. I was a little scared to talk to him too at one stage when I was young. He’s just too serious and there’s no communication and interaction going on. The only thing he talked to us was, “How’s your exams?”, “Are you studying hard?” serious stuff like that. But still I respected him a lot and whenever I had problems, he always turned out to be my hero, my savior who would somehow found ways to solve all sort of problems for me. Sometimes I didn’t even dare to go up to him, because I felt really bad to bother him out of his busy schedule. So I turned to my mum for help most of the time. It was really funny to see that most of the time; my mum waited for my dad to come back to solve the problems. And to my amazement, my mum heaved a sigh of relief after informing every problem regarding us and the household because my dad would manage to fix them all up, somehow.

After growing up, I realize that there are certain problems that my dad can be helpless in. As I age, he’s also getting old. The role of him taking care of me is gradually reversing. And my impression of a strong and great hero is becoming vague. I would say that image of my dad as my hero was captured and saved in my heart and memory of the olden days.

Few years ago, I read an article somewhere about females actually model their male romantic ideal on their relationship with their father (and if I remember correctly it was also written that males model their female romantic ideal with their mother). This is because father is the first male they encounter and interact in their life. I think this observation tells some truth. I was discussing this with some of my girl friends in several occasions and so far they agree with this. Last week, we chatted about this with Mrs. Nice and she admitted that Mr. Nice does have some qualities resembling her father. I don’t mean that we are looking for a clone of our dad. It is easy and natural for girls to use our father as a reference with our guys we are interested with. Say, my father is a responsible man. Naturally I tend to give a plus to guys who have this quality too, whereas if my dad is a gambler; I do not wish my children’s father to be one too. Oops, have I freaked out all my guy readers here? Don’t worry, we girls are not looking for someone to baby sit us or solve everything for us. It is the feeling of a mixture of like and admiration upon someone whom we want to share our lives with, whom we call our hero.

Though dad was my hero when I was young, I realize he’s not really my hero and can’t be one forever. Eh, you know I can’t fight with my mum. *lol* All right then, I’ll just wait for my hero to appear. And I miss him.