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How your relationship with your father affects your dating life
Studies show that this very first male relationship and precious bond has a huge impact on our love life. STOCK PHOTO
What you need to know:
- The quality of the father daughter bond significantly influences her dating preferences and determines the quality of her future romantic relationships. It determines how a woman will relate to other significant men for the rest of her life.
They say a father is his daughter’s first love. 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. He becomes the man from whom she takes cues on how she ought to be loved. The quality of the father daughter bond significantly influences her dating preferences and determines the quality of her future romantic relationships. It determines how a woman will relate to other significant men for the rest of her life.
Just how much does a woman’s relationship with her father affect her dating life?
An abusive father
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. 29-year-old Diana Mwiti has a string of ex-boyfriends who were abusive. Her earliest memories of her father are those of an abusive alcoholic. Her childhood and young adulthood was riddled with emotional torment and beatings directed at her, her mother and siblings.
“No one was spared,” she says.
Diana who is in between relationships at the moment has been seeing a counselor after her last relationship ended explosively a year ago. From these meetings, she has been able to introspect.
“The abuse eroded my self-esteem growing up and this lowered my expectation in the men I dated.” Author Shari Jonas in her book Father Effects: How Your Father Influenced Who You Are and Who You Love agrees with Diana’s analysis of her love life. She writes that a woman’s self-esteem, her personality and the type of men she is attracted to are all directly linked to her relationship with her father. On the other hand, abusive men go for women who they can easily manipulate making an abuser’s daughter easy prey.
The financially unreliable dad
If you have encountered someone who had slept hungry because they couldn’t afford a meal, they will tell you that their motivation in life is to make sure that this does not happen again. It’s the same case for a daughter of a man who either because of poverty of irresponsibility could not meet her needs. This woman is more than likely to compensate by becoming financially independent in a subconscious attempt to make up for his failure.
Morris, a 33-year-old Nairobi based Lab technician dated such a woman for two years not very long ago.
Mostly, their relationship was working. The spark was there and he could even see himself growing old with her 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 was always stressing about how she could make that extra shilling. She never gave me a chance to take care of her. I felt like she was threatened by my masculinity at times,” he says.
The cheating father
Girls learn how they should be treated by watching how their fathers treat their mothers. What a growing woman observes about her father’s marriage related behaviour influences her romantic preferences. From him she learns what to expect, think and feel in her romantic relationships. If a father is a faithful and honourable husband, his daughter will expect and seek these positive qualities in her potential mates.
Zawadi, a 34-year-old small business owner is a daughter of a cheater. She 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. Although he has since passed on, her mother’s pain and heart break left a permanent mark on her.
“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 let someone in,” she says.
She entered relationships expecting unfaithfulness. Often times, this has become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
“I have trust issues,” she sums ups her love life.
The pampering dad
A man who gives his daughter everything and anything she asks for might look like a good father. Frederick Kiragu, a Nairobi based counselling psychologist however is of the view that an overly pampering father raises a woman who is manipulative and controlling.
In his view, an ideal meaningful father-daughter relationship is where he mentors her into an independent well-adjusted adult. It involves trust, communication, guidance and love in abundance and largely depends on
how much a mother allows him to share in parenting.
In the event where a father cannot be involved in his daughter’s life due to death or a relationship breakdown, he says that dependable influence from a strong male can suffice.
“A girl needs a strong male she can look up so that she can understand that it is her right not a privilege to be respected by men,” he says.
Breaking the cycle
The good news for that woman who had a troubled relationship with her father is that the father- daughter, daughter –partner relationship pattern is not set in stone. The first step in breaking this pattern is acknowledging that you have a problem. Then focus on resolving underlying emotional issues. See a therapist if you have to.
