I Need a Hero!!!!

So, I confess, I love the old Bonnie Tyler song, I Need a Hero.  I belt it out in my car at the top of my lungs and picture every archetypal romance novel hero that exisits.  From a knight in slightly tarnished armor on a black horse (cause I have to be a little different!), to the hot cop with the oh so Freudian gun. 

What makes him a hero?  What qualities make this man irresistable to the heroine and to the readers alike?  Is it necessary that he be movie star gorgeous?  The answer to the last one is probably yes.  It is fiction after all, where even a plain heroine can land a smoking hot guy.  

Common elements of heros are that they have a lot of internal conflict.  The bottom line is he can't think of himself as a hero.  No matter what his job, what his motivation, it can't be to save the world.  Most romance novel heros feel on some deeper level that they are atoning for something, even if those sins aren't theirs.  Maybe he's a cop who lost a partner because he didn't go by the book, or possibly because he did go by the book.  We'll see a transformation in this hero from one extreme to another.  Maybe he's a kid from the wrong side of the track who feels the overwhelming urge to prove himself as a worthy person and devotes his life, risking it time and again, for his country.  Maybe he's a guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has to prove to himself and everyone else that he's more than the sum of his family's wealth.  So at the heart of every hero, he is conflicted.  Who he is, what he is and where he comes from all play a part in that. 

In terms of relationships, they want to be loved, need it, even if they don't recognize it, or feel unworthy of it.  They will NEVER verbalize that desire, at least not until the last chapter.  They will instead struggle with this guilt of developing a relationship with the heroine knowing that it can never work out because they are cursed, doomed, unlucky at love, on a mobster's hit list, have a job that makes them a target for violence every day, or in historicals, have no money, have a title that isn't truly theirs because they were secretly born a bastard, etc.. etc. etc.  Again, the secret is conflict. 

To write a compelling and readable hero, take a hot guy, inflict a world of misery on him, both internal and external and then throw him in the path of a woman who calls to him on an elemental level, and who makes the good better and the bad bearable.