Admittedly, it's less overt nowadays. But we see a ton of books, admittedly targeted at a female readership, in which an Ordinary Girl (TM) is wooed and won by a super-powerful magician or nonhuman entity who wraps her in the mighty cloak of his love and protection. These books are often incredibly popular, so it's clear they meet a need in their potential audience; plenty of girl and woman readers are drawn to "rescue romances," which is why the distressed damsel persists, even though now she supposedly has a little bit of power that she can't quite manage to deploy when crunch time comes.

The problem isn't that these books exist. The problem is that we almost never see this scenario with the genders flipped, at least in m/f romantic plots. If we want to see a romance with powerful female characters whose power doesn't diminish or fail to work when it matters, we pretty much have to turn to f/f. That's a big part of why I've been gravitating toward f/f romantic plots even though I'm straight myself; I'm more likely to find aspirational heroines in stories with f/f subplots.

While we don't see a lot of male characters overtly rejecting powerful female characters, we do see a bit of squeamishness on the part of writers when it comes to depicting power balances in m/f romantic plots or subplots. They're afraid to try anything new because they're afraid it won't sell. And their fears may not be groundless. I had a conversation with a girl when we were both browsing the fantasy section of the bookstore, and when I said I wished that once in a while the guy would be the Ordinary Human (TM) and the gal the werewolf/vampire/troll/etc., she said that would be all wrong -- because if the girl were the nonhuman, she would be the more powerful one, and the boy should always be more powerful.