How To Become His Muse

On men, love, and the feminine hero’s journey

How To Be His Muse

I’ve always been fascinated by the way men write love.

If you look at popular films and stories like Slumdog Millionaire, Braveheart, The Divine Comedy, even superhero movies, you might notice something curious: the girl is barely in it, but she’s everything.

She’s beautiful, pure, untouchable. And somehow, just the idea of her keeps him going. She’s his reason for risking everything.

It’s wild how often this shows up. The girl isn’t real, really. She is, but to him, she’s almost more of a symbol. A dream. The source of his inspiration.

I sometimes think men might actually be more romantic, at least in the idealizing sense. They build up this perfect version of a woman in their head, and that version becomes holy. You never see her flaws. She doesn’t even get the chance to mess up. She just exists. Beautifully.

Ernest Hemingway was often accused of writing two-dimensional women. But I think when a man is in love, he sees her as beautiful and good. It’s effortless.

Meanwhile, women fall in love with men knowing their flaws, and often because of them. Beauty and the Beast is the obvious example. “I can fix him” is a common trope. Or Chelsea in The White Lotus, softly saying about Rick: “I can heal him.” Even subconsciously, a girl wants to be her hero’s source of redemption.

So how do you become his muse? How can you not only be the object of his desire, but the reason he becomes great?

Modern women aren’t given the best advice. And to be fair, “What do you bring to the table?” is transactional and terribly unromantic.

Meanwhile, men are often expected to be defective women, by feminists and “trads” alike. They’ve gone through two generations of girl power and been told they’re toxic for being boys doing boy things.

Growing up in the West while watching anime, I used to feel confused. Why did the boys get the cool powers while the girls were always on defense? The boys had fire, lightning, speed. The girls healed.

And then I became a teenager, fell madly in love, and realized I would give anything to heal my husband and family. I would take that over any superpower in the world.

It’s like Rapunzel in Tangled, singing over Flynn Rider’s wounds. That’s her magic. And that’s the feminine hero’s journey. It’s quieter, but no less powerful. You don’t need fire to change the world. Sometimes, you just need devotion.

A man needs his hero’s journey, yes. But so does a woman. Hers just looks different. While a man’s transformation is often external, shaped by trials and conquests, a woman’s is internal. She becomes through reflection, through sacrifice, through love.

This is why some women spiral into “finding themselves” in Eat, Pray, Love-style escapes. It’s a disordered version of something true: the feminine longing for purpose.

A woman isn’t meant to passively exist. She’s meant to cultivate her beauty, her goodness, her virtue. She must guard her purity in a world that mocks it. She must practice selflessness in a culture that celebrates indulgence.

A man must become.

So must a woman.

Just in a different way.

So how do you become his muse? The girl he writes songs for. The reason he gets out of bed and builds a kingdom.

By cultivating your virtue. Even if you can do it on your own, let him take care of you. Be sexy—not in a vulgar way—but in the way that makes you unforgettable. The girl he can’t stop thinking about.

Men are conquerors. This is why they fantasize about the Roman Empire, zombie apocalypses, or some mythic frontier. They are builders. Adventurers. They need to win or they feel they’ve wasted their time on Earth. It’s not immaturity. It’s design. It’s why they spend hours playing video games, why they obsess over sports, or love The Patriot.

A girlfriend of mine in L.A. once told me her boyfriend never listened when the TV was on. But that’s the thing, men don’t multitask. They zero in. Their brains are different. He wasn’t cruel. He was simply built for war, not words.

She also hated how he always tried to “fix” her problems. She didn’t want a solution. She wanted comfort. That’s where women come in. We’re the soft place to land, not the blueprint for escape. But that doesn’t mean his urge to fix is wrong. It’s deeply male. To build, to solve, to conquer. And if you truly don’t want a solution, just say, “Can you be a brick wall for five minutes?”

Most women don’t care about Mars, Viking ships, or who won what war. But men do. They long to go west. Into danger. Into greatness. It’s in their DNA.

Once you accept that the masculine and feminine are not rivals, but complements, you stop resenting the difference. You learn to move with it.

There’s a saying that “women dress for other women,” and that’s often true. But there’s nothing wrong with dressing beautifully for him. There’s a reason the muse has always been a woman.

Men are hopeless romantics in disguise. Give them a reason to rise, and they’ll move mountains.

A woman’s beauty and grace don’t make her less powerful.

They just mean her power moves differently.

Less like a sword.

But much more enchanting.