Your Daughter's Adult Years: Her Emerging Sexuality
How do father-daughter relationships generally change from the
time a daughter leaves high school until she becomes a “real”
adult? What usually puts the most stress on their relationship?
And how can father and daughter strengthen their relationship
or overcome these obstacles during her early adult years?
Changes & Tensions Both father and daughter need to change some of
their attitudes and behavior in order to create a more adult relationship
with one another during her college-age years. Unfortunately what usually
happens is that one person is readier to change than the other. Either dad
is treating his daughter too much like a little girl while she is striving
and wanting to become an adult. Or dad is treating her like an adult while
she is still behaving and wanting to be treated like a child. Your mutual
struggle as father and daughter to create an adult to adult relationship
usually reaches it peak over these three issues: his money, her sexual
lifestyle, and her career plans. let’s turn our attention to sex.
Assumptions about Uptight Dad One reason the daughter’s sexual
life creates tension for too many young women and their fathers
is that she assumes her father is far more conservative and far
more uptight than he actually is. When this happens, the
daughter lies, deceives, and hides a lot of what’s going on in
her life from her father. And that’s not good for their
relationship. Feeling guilty, she goes to great lengths to
pretend to be the virginal, non-sexual little girl that she
believes her father wants her to be. Fearing that her father will
love her less or respect her less if he discovers that she is not
an innocent, virginal girl, she may end up refusing to share
anything about her personal life with him – depriving herself and
her father of the chance for him to be her advisor and ally in
matters of the heart. I am not suggesting that daughters share the
intimate details of their sexual lives with their fathers. But I
am saying that by time daughters leave adolescence, they should
not be pretending to be sexually innocent children in order to
please “daddy”.
Although it is true that most fathers want their daughter to wait
until their late teens before having sex, it is not true that most
fathers want or expect their daughters to be virgins when they get
married. This quiz is one way for fathers and daughters to get the
conversation started about dad’s beliefs.
Your Father’s Generation: Not Such Uptight Guys! What do you believe
are true about most men now between the ages of 45 and 60?
- ___ Most were virgins when they got married.
- ___ Most have been married only once.
- ___ Most waited until their twenties to have sex for the first time.
- ___ Most married a virgin.
- ___ Most disapprove of people having sex before marriage.
- ___ Most never drank or smoked cigarettes as teenagers.
- ___ Most never used any illegal drug.
- ___ Most oppose sex education in the schools.
- ___ Most want abortion made illegal again.
- ___ Most believe that interracial marriages should be outlawed again.
- ___ Score (10 possible trues)
What’s your score? The correct answer is zero. Not one of these
statements is true. Most men who are now in their 40s and 50s were
not sexually or socially conservative as young men —and neither
were the women they dated and married. Only 10% of the men and 20%
of the women were virgins when they married. Having sex before
marriage, drinking, and smoking were the norm, not the exception.
More than half of those married people got divorced and 20% of all
parents never got married. Nearly a third of the women were already
pregnant when they married. Most men had three or four lovers before
marriage, and most women had more than one. Interracial and interfaith
marriages increased dramatically during the 1960s and 70s. The legal
right to terminate a pregnancy, to marry someone of another race, to
keep your job if you’re gay, and to possess small amounts of recreational
drugs without being sent to jail exist because dad’s generation created
more liberal laws. In short, there’s not as much difference as a daughter
might think there is between her father’s generation and her own.
On the other hand, some fathers are more sexually conservative than their
daughters – and some daughters are more conservative than their fathers.
When that’s the case, do not try to change one another’s sexual values.
You’re each entitled to your own beliefs because you are both adults. For
the sake of your relationship, accept each other’s right to live your
sexual life in the way that you have deemed is best for you. Having to
adopt exactly the same sexual values should not be a requirement for a
loving, meaningful father-daughter relationship.
These excerpts are from
Embracing Your Father: How To Build The
Relationship You Always Wanted With Your Dad by Dr. Linda Nielsen.