Wonder Woman: For the Man Who Had Everything…

Steve Trevor grew up without a mother.

In fact, even both his grandmothers had been dead before he was ever born. He had no aunts, no nieces, and certainly no sisters…He inhabited, in some respects, fully a man’s world.

In school, his good looks made him popular with girls, but he always kept aloof from them. He fled to the army life in an era when there were few enough women serving in the United States military. He lost himself in the fraternal life, had never known anything else. 

Then one day he crashed a plane into Themiscyra, Paradise Island. Home of the Amazons, where no man had ever stepped foot. And he met Diana.

Meaning, you understand, their story was parallel. Steve, when he brought Diana to Man’s World, where she became known as Wonder Woman, was quickly overshadowed. Diana herself never forgot him, but the rest of the world did. She considered them soulmates. He was made liaison, a token gesture. If there was a romance, it was never consummated. They never married. They never fought, either, never danced around the exact terms of their relationship, hopelessly intertwined, something they both just understood, the hole they had both plugged in their lives, the exact missing shape.

Wonder Woman became inescapable. Steve followed in her shadow. He never put on a costume. He was never accepted by her family, never welcomed as part of it. He became an outsider in both worlds. He wasn’t even welcome in her heroic community.

He never resented this for a single moment. 

You might find this hard to believe, I know. Somewhere in that heart surely lurked a chauvinist. Where did his story go, in his most private thoughts? Where might his deepest yearning have gone? Could he really understand, let alone accept, this woman suddenly thrust into his life?

For the man who’d had everything, only to discover, in a sudden shocking revolution, what he’d missed, his eyes filled with…wonder. Not at the idea. But Diana herself, so full of power, and also, so…humble. Because of Steve, thrust into the world, learning all of that, so much of it…alien to her. Learning what men were like…and what women were, in Man’s World. And wanting it to function as well as, well, Paradise.

And Steve, who had grown up in a world without women, to integrate the idea in the most perfect way possible. He couldn’t ask for anything more.