DAUGHTERS AND FATHERS

The letter from Girl in Need in Baltimore (December 24) who needed more time from her father is a cry for more attention from her father who is afraid to spend too much time with her. I was a member of a Divorced and Separated Catholics group for about 12 years. Most of that time I was the only male in the group and I had the chance to listen to the women’s reasons why their marriage failed. What most of the women did not realize is that nearly all men have much stronger sexual urges than they do. The strong sexual urge in the wrong situation can be extremely frightening to the man.
I once had the opportunity to talk to a lady who was having problems in her marriage. Her husband was angry because the woman was continually picking fights with him. In the course of our conversation, the lady told me that when she was young, she and her father would have boxing matches!! The boxing matches were the father’s way of “sexually safely” interacting with his daughter. The young lady learned that love and attention from her father and later from her husband required something similar to a boxing match. Her husband, of course, had no idea why his wife was continually picking fights with him. The fights were her way of gaining attention from her husband.
When a girl is very small (less than 10 years old perhaps) she and her father often are “pals” and spend a lot of time together. Sports activities are just one of the things that bring father and daughter together. Both the father and the daughter are happy with the arrangement. However, when the daughter begins to reach puberty and starts to become a woman, the father’s attention to his daughter becomes much less. It becomes much less because the father is terrified of his own feelings. Any man sees almost any woman as a beautiful person and is attracted to her. This attraction is normal and is what makes the human race grow in numbers. Such attraction between a father and his daughter is socially forbidden and rightly so. The father is terrified of his own feelings and begins to distance himself from his daughter. The daughter, of course, has absolutely no idea why her father is not as close as he once was. The daughter then somehow blames herself and her self-confidence as a woman decreases. Of course, blaming her father is not a good option because the daughter loves her father and does not want to believe that he has changed. I suspect that the lack of self-confidence that so many women have is due to the change in their father’s ability to “safely” be close to her. Eventually, the daughter finds her own man to pay more attention to her and a marriage is the result.
The same dynamic occurs in Australian aborigines. The struggle for food in the desert “outback” of Australia is so intense that only very small bands of aborigines can exist in any one place. The population-size must be kept low enough so that food for all can be found. A tribe has several distance-separated clans. Because of the small number of people in the outback desert, there is a danger of genetic reproductive errors that can produce mentally and physically damaged children. With absolutely no knowledge of genetics, the aborigines have developed a system to solve the population genetics problem. A marriage is allowed in aborigine society only between a man and a woman from different tribes. This separation minimizes the danger of genetic errors. Also, the man marries a much younger woman so that the peak reproductive years of the man and his wife are “out of sync” and result in fewer children and a smaller population. However, this system means that the newly married man and his mother-in-law are about the same age. The problem of a possible attraction of the man for his mother-in-law is avoided by the policy that any needed interaction between mother-in-law and son-in-law must be carried out without the son-in-law seeing his mother-in-law. Any necessary conversation is carried out with the son-in-law and mother-in-law speaking when they are back-to-back and do not see each other.
The father of the “Girl in Need From Baltimore” is terrified of his own feelings and is doing what the aborigines of Australia do and has removed himself from too much close contact with his daughter.

OLDERWISER