Daddy's girl 2

Eleven years ago this month, Ayelet Waldman published an essay in which she said she loved her husband more than her children. She went on to suggest that it was the sexual intensity in her marriage that caused this to happen. It caused quite a sensation. The hatred flowed like Niagara Falls. Some people threatened to turn her in to social services for abusing her children.

A decade later, she stands by the essay and good for her. But she didn't go far enough. Loving your spouse more than your children not only doesn't do them any harm, it helps them. Loving your spouse gives you the strength to love your children better.

The love between a parent and child is not equal. As a parent, you have to to love your child. You have to forgive your child. You have to give your child more than they give you. You need a source of strength to do that. You need to love someone in a truly reciprocal relationship between adults to achieve that and the best way to do that is a loving sexual relationship.

When you don't have that, you will make unfair demands on your child. You will ask them to support you in matters they shouldn't have to worry about. You will share with them things they shouldn't have to think about. Neither of you will notice it happening but you will be denying her the chance to become a fully-developed, independent adult.

Many of us have to deal with the negative effects of having a mother who is too focused on her children (and I may say something about some day but the subject has been thoroughly covered elsewhere). Though that is far and away the more common problem, some fathers deal with a cold and distant wife by bonding with their daughters. This bond typically starts as early as age five but becomes particularly intense when their daughters, as many children tend to do, switch allegiance from their mother to their father in their teens. That shift in allegiance is a powerful source of good if it is a shift from one role model to another. Not because there is something wrong with mothers as role models but because there is something wrong with only having one kind of primary role model and your mother is a giant influence on your early life. But something else, and decidedly not good, happens when a daughter switches from one love object to another instead of from one kind of example to another.

I dated two daddy's girls in my younger years. It has a lot to say for it in some ways.

1. A Daddy's girl gets really close to her father. They had little secrets, in-jokes and a private language that only they and their fathers shared. That's also a natural thing for any couple to do. When you date such a woman, she easily creates an intimate, private world with you because she's been practicing since she was a child. 
2. She picks up on guy activities really quickly. You can go sailing, fishing, drinking with her just like one of the guys.
3. She and her father united against Mummy because he wasn't getting what he needed from Mummy and, his daughter will conclude, Mummy wasn't good enough for Daddy. Mummy was cold and unavailable and a Daddy's girl is determined never to be that. 
4. Unlike Momma's boys who tend, as Robert Glover puts it, to remain monogamous to their mothers, Daddy's girls are very sexual. To become like her mother would be to betray Daddy. She thinks that Mummy let herself go. She thinks that because she judged her mother from the perspective of a woman in her teens looking at Mummy in her forties. She sees this cold and dowdy woman and vows to be forever hot. 

And that all sounds pretty good. But there's a fatal flaw in it. For, no matter how good it seems, this woman will always relate to you as a child to an adult. She will never accept full responsibility for the relationship. Her only responsibility is to keep on being the woman she thinks is true to her father. She will not only not care about your emotional needs and vulnerabilities, she'll get angry at you for even having any. And she'll betray you and get angry at you for even daring to be hurt. Daddy always remembered his little princess, the reverse was not the case. And when she did do something for him, she did it on the expectation that his gratitude was automatic and extravagant. She didn't do it for him but for the reward it gave her. And that worked for them. It won't work for you.

Again, the sexual side sounds great except that she isn't doing it for you. She isn't even doing it for herself. She's doing it out of fear of failure and long before she actually reaches the age her mother was when she first judged her so harshly she will begin to see that she has set an impossible standard for herself. Only she won't see it as a standard she set for herself. She'll see it as something the world, and that includes you, is imposing on her. And you really don't want to be around when that happens; the massive cognitive dissonance and narcissistic rage will redefine personal cruelty for you. It may be directed at others (like you, for example) or it may be directed at herself; either way, it will be horrible.