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Just like my daddy
A girl worshipping her father to the extent that she unconsciously desires his carbon copy in her husband or boyfriend is hardly odd.
Shock. That’s what you must have felt when you watched Vladimir Nabokov’s adaptation of Lolita. The passion between the father and daughter, almost edging on incest, is a bit too extreme. However, a girl looking up to her father, to the point of idolising him, is common in most families.
A case in point is this woman who was quite troubled when she visited the counsellor. Her father was an alcoholic and strangely enough, she had fallen for somebody who turned out to be an alcoholic too. She was nearing 40 when she realised that, perhaps unconsciously, she had always compared her husband to her father.
This is not an isolated case. You’d often find people joking about Electra complex. But a girl worshipping her father to the extent that she unconsciously desires his carbon copy in her husband or boyfriend is hardly odd.
Past perfect
“A lot of women carry a strong impression of their father as they grow up. It’s natural that her dad is a hero when she’s very young because it is the first relationship she shares with a man. It then follows that the child would intently watch how her father treats her mother which, in turn, creates images in her own mind,” says clinical psychologist Dr Trupti Jayin.
The love for a father often intensifies, as the girl begins looking for his attributes in her prospective partners.
“I have no idea when it all started. I would always tell my boyfriend, ‘look, how my dad handles it’, or ‘you can never be as smart or as intelligent,” says Ashima.
“Women take some time to realise. The comparison begins by the time the girl is in college. Initially, she’ll think her partner is better than her dad. What she won’t realise is that her dad has already become the yardstick for her to gauge her partner,” explains Jayin.
“I try not to draw comparisons consciously. You know, it hurts them. No two persons can be same anyway. My dad might be my first male friend and my husband is my best friend. They act as two strong pillars of support. It’s better not to confuse the two relationships,” says Aarti.
“Today, women are working and socialising with male colleagues all the time. So they have a lot of surrogate models, apart from their fathers. It’s more about being aware of your partner as someone new and not look at him as a mirror image of your dad,” says Jayin.
