We are constantly told that women are attracted to men like their fathers. Rooted in Carl Jung’s Electra complex, and materialising in the pop culture world as ‘Daddy Issues’, it’s almost the expectation that women with complex paternal relationships will find a partner who mirrors their source of trauma.
Perhaps this is because the father is, often, the first male role model. This is the man who you will base your expectation of other men on. His capacity to love, emotional availability, and physical presence, all coalesce to form a certain standard. Some fathers are loving and present, so they set the bar incredibly high. For others, their fathers are absent, cold, abusive, or temperamental, so the bar is set much lower.
The problem is that, in practise, you can’t identify whether the standard of your father is high or low; in the absence of anyone to compare him to, he just seems normal. Therefore, when he puts minimal effort into maintaining your relationship, you begin to believe these are normal male behaviours, rather than red flags.
I never realised how damaging this was until I started dating and realised I was unable to objectively measure the quality of my boyfriends. My father is emotionally unavailable, incredibly temperamental, and self-absorbed, meaning I felt I had to be attracted to men with these characteristics. I would date boys who would be glued to their phones when we were together yet failed to text me when we were apart. Boys who, four months down the line of dating, suddenly ‘weren’t sure if they wanted a relationship’. Boys who could calculate exactly what to say to point out my physical flaws, yet didn’t understand the simple word ‘no’.
I was taking the most disrespectful f***boys and projecting onto them an embellished version I’d invented. They were two unrecognisable images, when you lay them side by side, the kind that belong in a Sunday newspaper’s spot the difference. I would gush to my friends about how great they were, only to be met with looks of confusion, as they tried to understand the different dimension that only I could see. A world in which a boy asking if I got home okay deserved a gold star and, if he didn’t guilt-trip me into sex, got a commendation.
Slowly, these types of relationships wore me down. My anxiety heightened the more I clung onto turbulent, failing relationships, my self-esteem plummeted as their validation ebbed and flowed. Gradually, the realisation that I was unlovable, just like my father had prophesied, pushed me onto antidepressants.
Eventually, I grew sick of sitting across from boys who were disappearing in front of my eyes, their absence morphing into my fathers. Perhaps you feel like this too.
It took a lot of conversations with friends and silently observing other people’s relationships, to learn what normal was. It’s not normal to be in relationships where you feel unloved, undervalued, or disrespected. It’s definitely not normal to be in relationships that ruin your mental health.
But, once I came to this realisation, there was another wave of self-hatred, as I asked myself ‘how could you let yourself be treated like that?’ I also had to learn that it’s not your fault if you rely on destructive relationships as a crutch, while you navigate the damage that’s been done by a loved one. I can’t blame myself for being so delusional – for valuing insignificant boys – when my entire life my father has set the bar so low. To keep myself sane, I had to believe his emotional unavailability was acceptable behaviour. And so, when I congratulated one boy’s ability to not make me cry, I was scoring his behaviour against a warped system, in which the bare minimum was deemed acceptable.
To discontinue awarding boys for toxicity involved unlearning two decades of emotional neglect. It involved retraining my brain to push beyond what I considered was ‘good enough’ and see if there was anything on the other side. It turns out, if you keep heightening your standards then your expectations will be met. I swiftly jumped from a boy who refused to be seen with me in public, to a boy who’d arranged a date, booked a table and actually watched the series I recommended.
We love to villainise women for expecting better, but we have to actively stop ourselves from romanticising red flags. The media normalises unhealthy relationships and everyone who strives for a healthy, respectful, non-toxic one is dubbed ‘a helpless romantic’, ‘picky’ or ‘demanding’. It’s as if we accept that being left on read for two weeks is an established, expected part of dating. But why should it be? Ultimately, if I already have one absent figure in my life, why would I want my boyfriend to be another?
It’s funny – or perhaps the word is impressive – that my taste in men has evolved beyond my father. That the desire for someone who shows up has overtaken the gut instinct to choose pain. That the need for loyalty, dependability and love, is now a priority, not something to be compromised upon. I just wish this is what I was told to aim for as a young girl, rather than feeling trapped into a cycle of abuse where I’m told that dating my father will solve all my problems.