For some men, sex is the only way that is acceptable to them to achieve intimacy with women.  If their father did not show them by his example and words that a man can connect with a woman in a nonsexual way, this is the only way they know.  When a man like this becomes a father to a daughter, she presents him with a terrible dilemma.  As long as she is little, not yet womanly, his sexual and emotional ambivalences are kept at bay.  But once she begins to develop, her body complicates things for him.

I think that one of the main reasons that some fathers become emotionally detached from their daughters is their unconscious fear of being sexually attracted to them.   Where other fathers might sublimate this fear into indulgence, or rigidity, or rage, the distant father *denies* it with such energy that he can’t find anything halfway between love and lust.  It is easier to push his daughter away than to risk the only way he knows how to connect with a female: sexually.

Of course his daughter has no clue about his psychological turmoil.  All she knows is that he seems to be mad at her all the time, or he suddenly starts neglecting her.  She used to be close to her Dad, but now he seems distant, or starts criticizing her, or her clothes or her friends.  All she knows is that it’s hard to figure out what, if anything will please him the way she used to please him.

Daddy’s affectionate approval is the prize for which the daughter must feverishly work, providing she can find the key – the terribly good or extremely bad behavior that will get him to pay attention to her again. And when she cannot, she believes it must have something to do with her – it must be that she is not worth loving.

By assuming responsibility for her father’s emotional absence, she fills in the blanks of his inattentiveness with fantasies of how he would be if she *were* more lovable.  Self-blame gives the illusion of control – it is far more preferable to think that she is not “good enough” than to imagine that there is no feeling from her father at all, no possibility of ever gaining his love.

The consequences to a daughter of having an emotionally distant father can be varied.  She might have anorexia nervosa, with a distorted body image in a wish to be either Daddy’s adored boy or to be the asexual person without breasts that Daddy used to love.

Or she may, in adulthood, look for the kind of man who doesn’t really notice her, doesn’t look at her, doesn’t see her.  Emotionally distant fathers are a constant disappearing act in the hearts of their daughters, who do not get the full experience of having a father.  Rather, they get only glimpses of the shadow he leaves in his psychological and physical retreat from her.  And when these daughters enter into romantic relationships, it is the disappearing shadow, and not the whole man, to whom they often respond.

Another consequence is that sex with a man can become a kind of double bind.  If a father is sexually uptight when his daughter is a little girl, he transmits anxiety to her.  He doesn’t want her to sit on his lap, he isn’t comfortable hugging her – which makes her feel that it is “wrong” or uncomfortable to be demonstrative in a physical way with a man.  If being a good girl means not being physical, the result is her inhibition and repression.

In a sense these daughters are the fulfilled prophesies of their father’s own confusion and ambivalence.  In an attempt to be eternally good, “acceptable” girls, some daughters may relegate eroticism to the safe, forbidden zone of empty or inappropriate affairs, in which they can respond without shame.  They may plunge into anonymous sex with a zealous detachment, able to become erotically satisfied only when love is not at stake, only when there is nothing to lose.

Many other daughters of distant fathers are unable to reach orgasm, or achieve it with consistency, with *any* man.  They have trouble in bed because for them, affection and arousal are synonymous with rejection.  Often, the greater a woman’s difficulty in reaching orgasm, the more likely she is to be concerned about the lack of dependability of love objects.  She is concerned about how changeable relationships are, and how easily loved ones can be lost.  

Distant fathers, in retreating from emotional involvement with their children, create in them a poignant and profound longing for fatherly affection.  When these fathers remain hidden behind their emotional barriers, they become strangers both to their families and to themselves, unaware of their role in their children’s “father longing”, and blind to their complicity in their own isolation.