Name: A Test to Measure How Good Your Father Was
Uploaded: 2025-09-10T17:58:49.000Z
Duration: 7 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Reflexive pronouns

It's a hugely special and propitious moment, widely celebrated in the heavens, if we believe in such places, when a heterosexual woman finds herself in a position to say to a man, perhaps on an early dinner date, Oh, I like my father very much.

We've got a close and supportive friendship.

He's sweet and has always been there for me.

Though we might point to similar advantages in the case of other genders and orientations, this constellation can be worthy of its own particular consideration, not least because what's at stake isn't just a woman's bond with a father himself, but with men right across her emotional life.

A woman wouldn't, through such a statement, simply be saying that she got on with her dad.

She'd be hinting at an above-average chance of succeeding at the challenges of adult love.

A good father may not be able to spare his daughter every kind of suffering.

He will offer her some of the following bounty nevertheless.

He will set a baseline for acceptable treatment.

He will define in his daughter's mind what a good man can and should be.

Later on, when this woman meets a sweet-hearted, welcoming, sane suitor, she won't hold any of his goodness against him.

She won't be tempted to blame him for his interest in her.

She won't think there's something wrong with him because he isn't cold and doesn't want to bully her.

And likewise, when she meets men who are busy or offhand, cruel or constantly furious, she won't feel that she's coming home or that there is an inherent rightness to her feelings of danger, invisibility and submission.

She won't confuse brusqueness with intelligence, callousness with strength.

She won't have the slightest proclivity to being mesmerised by unavailability or to try out being cruel herself to erase memories of her early victimhood.

There will be nothing glamorous whatsoever for her in nastiness.

There won't be any hidden appeal in insensitivity.

She'll simply be very puzzled that brutes exist and immediately wonder why she might have strayed into their company.

A good father will have known how to be ordinary.

He won't have used the advantages of age or power or knowledge to impress and grandstand in front of his girl.

He'll have shown himself to be human with everything implied by the word, sometimes silly, sometimes ignorant, sometimes sad, a little bit confused, not a remote colossus or all-knowing seer.

He'll have been around often enough to cement an impression of his humdrum yet precious existence.

He won't have made his appearances feel like special occasions.

He'll have allowed his daughter to take him for granted, week in and week out, so that later on she won't have to confuse love with pining, loss or absence.

He'll have created for his daughter a readiness to accept the limitations and strictures of daily life.

She won't be tempted to dream of gods, faraway princes or remote heroes as alternatives to reality because she'll have had experience of the deeper joys of someone who was present, modest and at peace with himself.

A good father will, without any need for ideological slogans, have shown his daughter what equality might feel like.

He'll have taught her about the dignity of all genders by asking for her opinions on how to fix a bicycle tyre and listening to her remarks about the money supply in her economics paper.

He won't have given her any reason to try to persuade a man who didn't fully believe in her.

She won't have had to grow into a people pleaser because she pleased one person who truly mattered.

A good father won't have told her that she was more special than she was.

He won't have needed her to be his golden child, to make up for some deficiency or sense of invisibility in himself.

He won't have needed her in order to counterbalance his own chaos or childishness.

A good father won't have asked her to be any more brave or strong than she wanted to be.

He won't have used her as a target on which to play out his unresolved relationship to his vulnerability.

He won't have been threatened by her interest in either teddy bear picnics or rock climbing, fairy outfits or triathlons.

He will have allowed her the privilege of developing at her own pace, according to her inclinations, of never needing to be mature for her years, of being fully a child in her childhood.

A good father will have walked a hugely careful line around appearance.

He will have made his daughter feel that he had noticed her and endowed her with a calm, unflustered sense of her power.

He will have spared her any aspiration to charm a random multitude, to compensate for the injury of having been ignored by one person in particular.

At the same time, a good father will always have respected her privacy, won't have called her his special little princess, told her to keep secrets or dropped hints about his unhappiness with mummy.

He won't have given her any sense that he might forget about boundaries, burdening her with an unfair need to police them herself by toning down her exuberance or charm.

He will have allowed her to enjoy her full adult sexuality without fear.

With the help of such a list, some of the toll of poor fathering comes more clearly into view.

Fathers who can't resist ensuring that they are outsized heroes, fathers whose hugs are too tight, fathers whose attentions are forever elsewhere, with work, a sibling or military history, so that their daughters must ask themselves implicitly throughout their lives, what might be wrong with me?

Fathers who will one day be the cause of an entirely unnecessary bill being paid to a plastic surgeon, fathers who set up an equation between love and suffering, love and unkindness, love and absence.

Good fathers lead to daughters who won't need to plead or beg, who will get no pleasure from being ignored, who will not be overly preoccupied by their appearance or their status, who will never refuse love nor randomly blow up tender relationships for reasons they can barely understand.

Whenever we encounter sickly love, we know that the story did not begin here.

And equally, whenever there is tolerance and happiness, an ability to give and to receive affection, we know there will have been crucial antecedents at play.

Somewhere off stage, there will be a largely unheralded hero who will have facilitated a path towards maturity and contentment.

Many a man who has found himself loved reliably by a good, steady and sane woman will, unbeknownst to him, have had another, older, perhaps now dead man, to think for his momentous blessing.