Soft and powerful: Why I love my spouse (and Ben Solo)

 

Image from Star Wars UK: https://x.com/StarWarsUK/status/1706232072799420536

Soft and powerful: Why I love my spouse (and Ben Solo)

by Jen Davies, nerd

March 18, 2026

This expression, “soft and powerful”, is something I pulled out of this video by TheVomcharTV: https://youtu.be/osT8u9i4d0c (start around 50” - it’s quoted in the last 3 minutes of the video).

It came originally from Alina Corbett’s blog titled “Let Him Live” (https://alinacorbett.substack.com/p/let-him-live), which I had read but that word-pairing had not stood out before. It’s a blog post expressing frustration over the cancellation of a post-sequels Star Wars film, The Hunt for Ben Solo, after several years of work and even some pre-production work at Lucasfilm. After a thoughtful discussion on an idea called The Wounded Masculine (and I think you could substitute the pop culture idea of Toxic Masculinity, which is not at all the same, but her argument still works), she argues, “The healing of the masculine wound in this story needs to be lived, not sacrificed. We need to see a redeemed man survive, to love, to rebuild, to be soft and powerful at once. We owe that vision to the boys.”

I don’t know why those words, “soft and powerful at once”, stuck out to me this time, but they did. And I thought I’d talk about why this idea is actually a pretty important one, speaking as someone who teaches counselling and other helping skills, and as someone who has been married to a man for over 20 years. I think at heart it’s talking about the capacity to exercise one’s power from a place of feeling safe.

Why I fell for my spouse

If you asked me, do I believe in love at first sight? I’d tell you that overall I don’t believe most relationships that begin like a strike of lightning are likely to last. But I’d be lying by omission, because I knew I loved Lee (false name) the first time I saw him. I can still see the moment perfectly clearly: We were in university, and we had both moved into the dormitory a few days early (a privilege reserved for students who were coming from particularly long distances away). I was going to an event, I think, and he was just walking down the hall checking out the floor. He had broad shoulders (still does) and long hair (not anymore), and his face tended to a hint of a smile (still does). 

Lee could have stopped me and taken up a lot of space - White cisgender male, who I later learned had earned a black belt in a hand-to-hand martial art (he looked it), black t-shirt probably with Metallica on it, and boots that were loud when he walked - but he chose not to. He just smiled at me and when I didn’t engage with him (I was stunned), he kept walking. I learned later that he didn’t take the space because he wasn’t invited, and although he presented himself confidently he was desperately anxious about fitting in. He only wanted to be where he was invited.

The metal band t-shirts, and the muscles, and the boots were all things he was using as a show of power and a test. Lee wanted to be around people who could see past those things. People who might have thought about picking on him would see him as a threat, and spend their time elsewhere. It had been an effective survival strategy as an adolescent - it was a way he could exert some power over other people in his environment. If he looked scary to you, that was fine - stay away. But if he looked interesting to you, and you started a conversation - let’s see what happened. To use the language of the Corbett article, when someone looked past the passive scare-tactics was how he knew when he could be “soft”. 

As foolish young women will do, I loved how strong he was thanks to his background in martial arts. He had too much muscle (hard to cuddle with) - I much prefer his un-forced shape these days, but he’s still strong. The thing that kept me with him over 20+ years, though, is his brains. Lee is BRILLIANT - he can see through to the heart of things. And as he has gained confidence and has not felt the need for finding power through intimidation, he has become much more comfortable doing the opposite: he invites people in. His presence was always impossible to ignore, and now he uses that power to engage other people. That little smile I got the first time we saw each other, he uses it often now in his work, where he works with teenagers who are also trying to figure out how they’re going to fit into the world. He is in a place now where he can be both powerful and soft a lot of the time. 

And that’s because he feels safe most of the time. We feel safe when we don’t see threats all around us, and he now has the confidence that he can use the power of his warmth and charm  to manage his environment - and the shift from there to “soft” seems like a much shorter distance than it used to be from intimidation-mode. I like to think that having a spouse (me) who loves him helped him to get comfortable with his warmer kinds of power.

We feel safe when have some control or power in our lives

When we don’t feel like we have control or power in a situation - in other words, when we don’t feel safe - we have a few choices. If we are aware of the powerless or not-in-control feeling, and if we have the skills, we can choose to self-soothe, which might mean taking some deep breaths and shifting the self-talk in our heads to something more neutral or positive. Not all of us learn to self-soothe as children and adolescents, for a variety of reasons - there’s a large body of research on Attachment Theory that you can read if this idea interests you. It’s still something you can learn as an adult, though. This is the most pro-active of responses  because we can choose what happens next.

Or we can respond with one of the responses that’s embedded in the oldest part of our brains: fight, flight, freeze or fawn. There’s nothing wrong with these automatic responses in themselves, except that they don’t let us choose what happens next. Often we might like to have that choice, that’s all. Some people who are not good at self-soothing and therefore feel not-in-control and powerless more than they wish will end up in fight, flight, freeze or fawn often. 

Lee was not good at self-soothing (until he learned it as an adult), so he existed on the edge of ‘fight’ throughout his adolescence. 

The Ben Solo connection

I’m going to focus on the three sequel films only, because I just haven’t had the time to read any of the comics or novelizations. When we meet Kylo Ren (Ben) he is clearly seeking to intimidate anyone with whom he doesn’t have to talk into avoiding him, and he is prickly. He is ready to use that scary-looking lightsaber any moment. We could say, he is responding with ‘fight’ most of the time. That means he doesn’t feel safe most of the time - he feels low-power or not-in-control. Kylo Ren definitely engaged in displays of power, typically through violence (‘fight’). But he has to keep doing it, over and over, because the relief is short-lived. We understand why when we see that he is vying for influence in the First Order with Hux, and seeking to avoid vicious punishments from Snoke.

Ben didn’t learn to self-soothe very well, which makes sense given what we can guess about his parents: Han having been an absent father (in Ben’s opinion), and Leia having been unwilling or even afraid to teach him herself like there was something wrong with Ben (in Ben’s opinion). Probably a combination of him just being sensitive (in Attachment Theory, Anxious or Avoidant), on top of challenges related to the Force, led Ben to need more reassurance than it seems his parents were able to give him. Then sending an adolescent away to school without a firm understanding that he was loved, and no wonder he never felt ‘safe’ and was therefore always in ‘fight’ mode.  

So when Ben meets Rey he discovers very quickly that he can’t intimidate her but she isn’t a threat (like Hux or Snoke) - she sees through his tactic and once he gets over the shock, it’s really interesting. Eventually he starts to feel ‘safe’ around her, and he stops trying to gain power-over - except that he wants them to exist on his terms only. He’s still too stiff from all those years in ‘fight’ mode, and he still has to exist in ‘fight’ mode around the First Order - he can’t yet flex to meet her. 

When she kills him on the ruins of the second Death Star he doesn’t speak, but we can see on his face that he isn’t completely surprised. Maybe disappointed - there’s a lot of feelings going on because he had also just heard from his mother that she loved him. He IS surprised when Rey heals the damage she did - sending the very clear message with actions and words that Ben would always be safe with her, and she would be “with” him all the time if he would just put an end to this Kylo Ren thing. 

So he does. He needs a pep talk from the memory of his deceased father, but he gives Kylo Ren up. And he could do that because he had found a place in his life where he could feel ‘safe: not in the First Order (like he thought would be the case - controlling the galaxy wasn’t all it was cracked up to be), but at Rey’s side. And now the rigidity he had forced on himself is gone, and we actually in Adam Driver’s performance how Ben moves less stiffly and more naturally because he is allowing himself to be himself - because he feels like it’s ‘safe’ to do that for the first time in ages.

And in being himself he feels powerful and in-control - so much so that he brings Rey back from the mostly-dead, even though he had only ever observed how to do it the once when she fixed him. He wept, because he didn’t have to be ready to ‘fight’. He could be “soft” when he felt safe, being himself and also with her.

The dying part… that was a writing mis-step. Separate topic to be addressed another time.

#thehuntforbensolo #adamdriver #starwars