By Joan Thatiah
Posted Friday, December 30 2011 at 18:19
Posted Friday, December 30 2011 at 18:19
IN SUMMARY
- How you relate with your male parent forever influences your interactions with persons of the opposite sex.
The mother-daughter relationship is one that is prized the world over. Conversely, fathers back off and become less emotionally intimate with their daughters when they reach adolescence. The unflattering truth is that close father-daughter relationships are a hard thing to come by and are considered less significant.
Experts, however, believe that the father-daughter relationship is equally, if not more, important than the mother-daughter one.
The quality of the father-daughter bond significantly influences her dating preferences and determines the quality of her future romantic relationships. The early relationship a woman had with her father could be the answer to why she seems to attract only a certain kind of man and repeats the same relationship patterns.
Nairobi-based psychologist Andrew Kiuna says this is because a father is the first man in a woman’s life. Her relationship with him is usually her primary and most enduring male love relationship.
Regardless of whether he is a good man or not, he becomes the earliest standard against which every prospect will be judged. A growing woman looks up to her father as a leader and a protector. In her father’s eyes, she learns her worth to the opposite sex. She gets from him her first impression of herself as a female, which determines whether she feels valued or rejected by the opposite sex. Self-worth for girls depends heavily on their relationship with their father.
If a woman had a good relationship with her father, she will be attracted to men who are just like him. One who had a negative relationship with her father is likely to fancy men who are different in an effort to cushion herself from hurt or make up for an unhappy childhood.
Studies suggest that women who experienced a positive relationship with their fathers subconsciously tend to be attracted to men with strong physical similarities to their father. Similarly, girls with good communication with their fathers will have significantly better communication with their love interest.
Abusive
One would assume that a woman who had an abusive father as a child will steer clear of men with abusive tendencies, but not quite. Women with abusive fathers are attracted to partners who abuse or abandon them.
Diana Gisuka, 29, can attest to this. Her earliest memories of her father are those of an abusive alcoholic. She had a turbulent childhood and a preadolescence riddled with both physical and verbal abuse. “All the men I have been romantically involved with have either physically or emotionally abused me. Each time I manage to end a relationship with an abusive personality, I end up with someone else who is just like him,” says Diana, who is in between relationships at the moment.
This destructive dating pattern stems from the fact that a woman’s view of the opposite sex comes from her early memories of her father and how he treated her and the women around her. Abuse erodes a growing woman’s self-esteem, lowers her expectations in a romantic partner and interferes with her ability to identify character or real love.
Author Shari Jonas, in her book Father Effects: How Your Father Influenced Who You Are and Who You Love, writes that a woman’s self-esteem is directly linked to her relationship with her father. This relationship also influences her personality, and the men that she is attracted to.
Women who were sexually abused by their father play out the pain and anger in different ways. A big number of them fall into prostitution. According to Dr Kiuna this gives them a false sense of control over men.
Financially unreliable
A daughter of a man who despite his ability failed to meet her financial needs is more than likely to compensate by becoming very financially independent. She is likely to become successful in a subconscious attempt to make up for his failure.
Chris, a legal practitioner in Mombasa, says that he has dated such a woman. Their relationship was functional, he says, but her quest for financial independence is what finally drove them apart.
“She couldn’t let me take care of her. She seemed to have everything figured out and she spent every waking moment thinking about how she could make that extra shilling. Her self-sufficiency deprived me of the chance to play that primal role of the provider and at times she threatened my masculinity,” he confesses.
Absent
A father need not be physically unavailable to be considered absent. A physically present father who ignores his daughter’s achievements and accomplishments raises a woman with a thirst for masculine approval.
These women will seek this validation in sex before marriage. They will unsuccessfully look for love and attention they should have gotten from their father from other men, often resulting in a downward spiral of unrewarding relationships.
Young women commonly interpret a father’s abandonment as personal rejection. She may attempt to find that missing link in other men, resulting in her making wrong relationship choices.
Cheater
Girls learn how they should be treated by watching how their fathers treat their mothers. If a father is a faithful and honourable husband, his daughter will expect and seek these positive qualities in her potential romantic matches. Daughters of cheaters enter relationships expecting unfaithfulness and it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Take Cynthia Dache for instance. This 30-year-old nurse witnessed her father’s infidelity from a very young age. Throughout her parents’ marriage her father always had someone else on the side, a fact he made little effort to hide.While most daughters of cheaters tend to be clingy and smothering in a bid to prevent their partners from wandering, there are those who turn out to be distant and emotionally cold.
“I have met men who would have made great partners in the past but I have this destructive tendency of sabotaging good relationships. I want to get married and raise a family in the foreseeable future but I don’t know how to get there. It is hard for me to love intimately,” she says.
Pampering
A man who gives his daughter everything and anything she asks for might assume that he is a good father.
But according to Dr Kiuna, an overly pampering father raises a woman who is manipulative and controlling. She will enter romantic relationships feeling that she is entitled to special treatment. She is bound to feel deprived if her romantic partners don’t treat her in the same manner and attitude her father did, which will have her going from one disappointment to the other.
In the psychologist’s view, a daughter ought to learn from her father from an early age that some things should be earned. He should not to shield her from his hardworking side. If she shares in this part of his life, she is likely to grow into a productive adult.
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