“…all he left us was alone…”

9♠

 

 

 

Some time ago, I briefly, vaguely, touched on the impact one’s parents has on future mate choice.

 

“Men date women much like their mothers.

Women date men much like their fathers (especially if they didn’t really have one but that’s for another day).”

 

Since I tacitly said I’d address my meaning later, I believe now is as good a time as any.

 

For whatever reason, the imprint a parent leaves on a child is frequently ignored in dating/mating discussions.

 

 

 

This has always puzzled me since it’s the first – and arguably most powerful – influence in one’s choices down the road.

 

Mothers/fathers provide the example – good or ill – for the romantic relationships in which we find ourselves.

 

They create the expectations we end up having.

 

The methods of communications we’ll anticipate.

 

The manners in which we’ll seek to be treated.

 

The punishment/reward systems to which we’ll respond.

 

So deeply does this initial imprinting affect us, it simply baffles me as to how it gets lost or glossed over in conversations.

 

 

 

Keep finding yourself with critical, unhappy, impossible to please women?

 

Look carefully at your mother.

 

Keep finding yourself with abusive, dismissive men?

 

Look to your father.

 

I guarantee you’ll spot more than you’d expect.

 

 

 

So powerful is this paradigm, so omnipresent, so all-encompassing, it takes conscious effort and action to notice it.

 

As the old saying goes:

 

A fish doesn’t know it’s wet.

 

And, as I mentioned earlier, an absentee father is no escape.

 

In fact, I posit that it’s even more impactful than one that is present.

 

 

 

As evidence, I offer just how pestilential absentee father epidemics are.

 

Once they get even the smallest foothold in a community, they spread like the most virulent of plagues.

 

Why?

 

I suggest a few reasons:

 

1} A present father can give looks at a spectrum of behaviors. Good and bad; positive and negative. An absentee one teaches only a single lesson: men are meant to breed and leave. Expect nothing but sperm. In fact, if a man stays around, he’s not a real man simply because men (in the girl’s experience) don’t stick around; only boys do.

 

2} An absentee father triggers the need to prove resilience in a massive – though negative – way. She needs to show she “doesn’t need a man”. She can handle life without such. Of course, this only opens the door to countless disasters but it’s too late by the time the error is realized. Additionally, later errors further trigger the need to prove resilience even more, thus digging an ever deeper hole.

 

3} The absence of a father causes her to default to her most basic programing of mate selection. She’ll choose the lowest, most easily read denominators: potential for violence, fierce independence, arrogance, et al. Now, this is not to say these things are not sought by perfectly healthy women. I’d be a fool and liar to suggest such thing. However, healthy women are infinitely more likely to seek those denominators with positive nuances that are missing in the cases of an unhealthy female search. If it helps, think of it as eating: dining from both dumpsters and restaurants will feed a person. But one is a much healthier choice than the other.

 

 

 

As a related side note, this leads me to a major reason I try to impart the lessons I do rather than simply teach pick-up lines and techniques; why I teach the physics, if you will, of it all rather than the “actionable advice” so often demanded.

 

But that’s for another day.

 

 

9♠