Fatherless Daughters by Pamela Thomas

Author:Pamela Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Daddy’s Role

One of the most important functions of a father is to help his daughter shape her sexual identity and her ability to relate lovingly and effectively with the men in her life. A father’s influence takes hold initially when his daughter is about four and then again when she enters puberty. I found among the women I interviewed that girls who had loving and attentive fathers, even if they had lost their father early in life (but after puberty), tended to have stronger and healthier romantic relationships with men than girls whose fathers had died or abandoned the family when they were children. Girls with loving, involved fathers learned how to interact with males (in all ways, not just romantically) by using their personal father-daughter relationship as a model. If they had a warm, interested male adult to talk to, they felt accepted and loved by at least one man.

In Claudette Wassil-Grimm’s book, Where’s Daddy? she says that “girls without fathers often became desperate for male attention.” Wassil-Grimm also came to the same conclusion that I did regarding the difference between girls who lost their father through death and those whose dad left. In general, “The girls [whose fathers had died] often either shied away from males altogether or went after them like sirens, being sexually used in the bargain. . . . Daughters of divorce tended to be promiscuous, while bereaved daughters tended to be overly shy around males.”

Although Jill, whose parents divorced when she was nine, had a continuing relationship with her father, she always felt her dad was simply doing his duty. Jill carried insecure, hopeless feelings that her father really didn’t care about her into her relationships with men, starting in early adolescence.

“Anytime I would meet a guy, there was always that huge insecurity factor,” Jill says. “I figured he was not really going to be interested in me. Why would anybody be interested in me? I’m not that attractive . . . I’m overweight . . . I’m this . . . I’m that. In high school, I wouldn’t say I dated, but I went out with guys, and I probably had a lot more sex than I should have. I had to get male affection somewhere, and that’s where I got it. [My parents’] divorce led to my mistrust of men and my feeling that the only way that I could be visible to men was in a sexual way.”

Everybody has embarrassing or funny stories to tell about early dating experiences; however, these experiences tend to be extreme for fatherless daughters and often painful. Lisa, whose dad died when she was ten, tells of being fixed up on a blind date when she was a twenty-year-old college student. “My roommate had a dinner party at our apartment, and she invited this very attractive lawyer for me to meet. After dinner, she said to me: ‘What happened to you? You excused yourself from the dinner table, and you went to the bathroom for thirty minutes.

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