A man’s daughter can be your biggest ally in the relationship you have with her father. Daughters can also be threats or perceived as threats to a relationship.
Plenty of young girls have learned that they can get away with just about anything as long as they smile sweetly. If that doesn’t work, tears at the right time usually do. The neglected wife watching the scene eventually gets angry at the attention directed away from her and toward her daughter. This can lead to some fierce battles throughout the years with neither the daughter nor the wife coming out winners.
In the case of a daughter by a prior marriage, the situation can be even worse. A father trying to make up for divorce damage can go overboard in the attention, gifts and indulgences that he lavishes on his child, no matter her age. Pity the poor girlfriend who disagrees! Or the new wife who tries to put her foot down.
“Matt and I met at one of those inocuous business functions that singles use to cruise for dates,” says Pamela. “Our eyes met, we clicked and that was it! Or, at least that was it until I met ‘sweet little April.’ That was Matt’s description of his daughter. Nothing sweet about that teen terror but she had her father so tied in knots he didn’t know good from bad. I recognized the signs and got out quick. It’s a shame, too, because he’s a good man and we could have had a nice life together. But, I could tell that it would be impossible for him to ever see that girl as anything other than a perfect fairy princess. There was no way I’d survive.”
A daughter may not be doing anything more devious than trying, against all odds, to reunite her parents into what she considers the perfect family unit. Regardless of how her parents feel about each other or how much they may have moved on in their own lives after the divorce, she may still think she can do something to get them back together.
If her father has been dating quite a bit she has probably seen a long parade of girlfriends come and go in his life and she may have resigned herself to the fact that getting emotionally involved with any female he introduces to her is a losing proposition. She may have built up a wall of self-defense to protect herself from the continual flow of hopeful females in his life.
One precocious teen was amused at a single woman’s attempts to meet her father, using her as the excuse. “It was all too funny,” she giggled. “This woman was like visiting next door and she kept coming over, inviting me to go shopping or to the movies, and all kinds of pal type stuff. Of course each time she showed up she was dressed in these sexy outfits, and whenever we talked she always was asking when Dad was going to be around, what did he like to do, did he like hair like hers — dumb stuff! She didn’t want to be with me! I was glad when she moved away, and I think my dad was too!”
If you’re dating a man with a daughter don’t use her as a wedge to get to him. Don’t place her in the middle of your relationship; be friends but don’t confide in her about the relationship you have with her father and don’t ask for her help with the relationship. If the relationship begins to dissolve, don’t try to enlist her aid, make her take your side, or talk poorly about her father to her.
If you have formed a special friendship with his daughter it may be particularly painful for both of you if the relationship between you and her father ends. If the relationship ends on a bitter basis it is doubtful you and she will be able to remain friends. If, however, the two of you part as friends, there is probably no reason that you and she can’t continue to maintain a casual friendship at least until the time that friendship causes problems with a new lady in his life.
When Shelly and Brad divorced, it was Brad’s adult daughter from his previous marriage who took Shelley aside and assured her that she wanted to remain friends. “I always thought the divorce was my mom’s fault, that my father could do no wrong,” she told Shelley. “At least I I felt that way until I saw how my father treated you. Now I see what she must have gone through during their marriage.”