072 - What It’s Really Like Dating Wonder Woman

Steve Trevor tells all.

Wonder Woman is great. Wonderful in fact. I fell in love with her the minute I laid eyes on her. We met on an app called Super/Natural that pairs superheroes with regular people. As it turns out, they don’t all like to date other superheroes. Some of them like the stability and reliability of a ‘normal’ partner. Some of them prefer a partner they count on to be there at the end of the day, rather than being out late fighting crime or saving a universe. I work in accounting. I know my limits.

I went on a few other dates via Super/Natural before I met Wonder Woman. More often than not it would end in sex, and then I would never hear from them again. I noticed they had no problem answering their various call symbols in the sky, but when it came to my texts they turned out to be super-bad at responding. Most superheroes care little for disasters of the heart.

Whether they checked the ‘Looking for long-term’ box or not, most superheroes weren’t looking for anything serious. Black Widow left me mid-date for a ‘national emergency’ across town, sticking me with the bill. But worse still were those just looking to fetishize me as a ‘non-hero.’ I never did like the way Cat Woman purred whenever I described the mundane details of my job. “You do THAT. ALL day. EVERY day?” My low stakes existence seemed to thrill her. My lameness was her kink. And while she was an excellent lover, I didn’t join this app for random sex, superhuman though it often is. I joined for love.

Wonder Woman and I met almost three years ago and have been living together for the last seven months in a pre-war apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. We go see movies together on Tuesdays when the Angelika sells tickets at half price. On Sundays we go to the park with our dog, Weasel. Every other Thursday we go to couples therapy, where we work to reconcile some of our more substantial differences. She has a poorer work-life balance than I do. And I have none of the superhuman abilities that she does. I have been called a wizard at Microsoft Excel but, all jokes aside, I’m quite talentless. And the place these differences crop up most often is in the bedroom… our thunder-dome of passion.

When she’s around, Wonder Woman exudes strength, sex appeal, and confidence like you wouldn’t believe. And she says she sees a lot of the same in me. But it’s hard, lying there after sex and thinking it through with a little more clarity, to believe that we are equals (at all, by any measure).

Today, for example, a supervillain and quite possibly a God, used their psychic powers to throw an entire bus at Wonder Woman, crushing her against a wall. I saw it happen live on Channel 6 news. I was so worried. But she brushed off the hit as if she’d merely stubbed a toe, gathered her strength, and continued to beat this villain down to a pulp to save the city. Hooray! But also…

I couldn’t let this one thought go – she was hit by a bus and hardly felt it. Not to belittle myself here, I go to the gym 4 times a week and I’ve started doing pilates… but I am not thrusting a bus into her with the brute force of a demigod. I try not to compare myself to the people and events in her world. I try to remember that if she wanted to leave me for a God, she could have done so many times already. But the replays were all over the news and equally ubiquitous in my mind as we made love that evening. And I couldn’t shake that feeling that I wasn’t the only one thinking about that bus crushing her up against the wall. 

Afterwards, from my position as little spoon, I asked her point blank, “Are you thinking about that bus from this afternoon?”