I often hear women say this.  They may wish their partners were more able to express their emotions, but their fathers are not held to the same standard.  Instead, they use adjectives of idealism or sympathy in describing how their fathers behaved during their childhood:  “stoic”, “cautious”, “repressed”, “browbeaten”, “dignified”, “reserved”.  Their father was the “strong, silent” type.  And indeed, in our culture, it is the man of few words who is often seen as the most masculine, and many men buy into this view of masculinity, and take it with them into their fathering style.  They do not understand their daughters, and aren’t involved in their lives.

Some fathers are emotionally unavailable to their families.  They don’t intervene when their children are attacked by the mother or by siblings.  Even when told by teachers or spouses or counselors that their children are in trouble, they take no action.  If their children ask them for help, they do not react.  They are simply oblivious to their children’s needs for love, encouragement, and affection.

But what appears to be a remote father’s indifference is often a vigorous attempt to keep his emotions under cover, like a calm lake with mysterious demons lurking far beneath the surface.  Most of these fathers are not really without feelings – it is that they are unable or unwilling to *express* their feelings.  Often, they were raised to feel that expressing feelings is a shameful thing for a male.  This is a reason for their behavior, but not an excuse – they can with effort overcome this and become the kind of fathers who are lovingly involved in their daughter’s lives.

Some fathers are very passive people, and will do almost anything to avoid becoming the target of someone’s anger.  They often marry women who are their temperamental opposites – steely women who dominate the family with impossible expectations and never-ending  fault-finding, the kind of women who only feel valued if other people are dependent on them, or controlled by them.

How do emotionally remote fathers get this way?  Perhaps it is a reaction to having had a domineering mother in their own childhood, combined with a father who was emotionally absent.  For some men like this, love with a woman is mixed in with anxiety, affecting their marriages, and they also end up losing their ability to empathize as fathers with their daughters.  

Men often affirm their masculinity in one of two ways:  first, by having women respond to them sexually; and second, by escaping women, making sure that a woman doesn’t get control of them.  And so for them, sex must not carry with it the risky entanglement of real intimacy.   But these sons would not be so terrified of intimacy if their *fathers* had played larger roles in their lives, and provided for them an example of masculine tenderness.  As it is, too many fathers are strangers to their sons.

I want to talk next about what happens when daughters have emotionally distant fathers.