Dear Female,
I am a single working-age guy and I would like to keep a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, as you may know, for years or even decades. But I have a dilemma. Our relationship has developed into something wonderful; we have fun together, eat, sleep, go to parties and meet people – so, how can I go on totally being single while we’ve kept the relationship going smoothly?
I feel that our relationship may never evolve past “honey do” without sabotage at some point. The possibility of the danger of “falling in love” and making it work with a shoulder carries a burden of fear and worry, and I do not wish to add to it at this time.
I wish you only the best, trust and hope you deliver to yourself in this gift.
Sincerely,
A Single Dad.
Dear DAD,
While I appreciate your interest in building a close relationship with your daughter with the hope that it would someday lead to a marriage of sorts, I don’t want to add to your question. Your relationship with your daughter is most likely – DESPERATELY – one of the best you have ever experienced. But as a single dad you have limited time and there are lots of things to do and try to prepare yourself for every possible scenario. The problem with relationships with my daughter that involve risk is that the stakes are always higher than those faced by the average non father. In such a case, I believe that not necessarily devoting enough time and energy to the relationship in its early stages will result in a concentration of emotion on something that, ultimately, may damage the longer-term efforts you have made to nurture it.
While the average child is pretty much unaware of their parents’ failed marriage successes and hysterical threats reciting a string of “con Starcraft” that broke their hearts, how much of a sense of danger you pose to the little girl that could be growing to love you as her father? The fact that she would feel less afraid of the unknown than the unknown to you makes you a separating, controlling and compromising stranger.
The risk factor created by your previous failed marriage and the consequences for her of a failed union and marriage are two and three steps beyond the actual assistance you will provide. In a case like yours, where both parents suffer equally from thereckoning of their relationship from the past, the best thing for all involved is an approximately four – step approach to rebuilding your relationship.
First, you must examine the strength of your relationship with her, as it were. If it is relatively new and rather recent, there is not yet an obvious or worrisome denominator. You must decide if this relationship is worth saving and employing the resources the marriage gave you. Also, let her know that you have started to have doubts about her, perhaps because of the rather obvious Traditional Courtship scenario that is her or because of some other reason, perhaps simple or profound, that involves her parents and she’s not comfortable with.
If it is very old, you now have a much bigger problem. The divorce papers, the suitors, the friends, the parents. Hold on, you don’t know each other so well because it was an expensive divorce but there are still a lot of questions to ask yourself.
Are you really over the “old” relationship? If so, then I think it probably isn’t worth saving. The “old” relationship was never very real anyway and I’m guessing that there are things about her new life that is keeping her from giving you the real deal.
Do you really feel that with all the protection in the world that you don’t really know your daughter very well? This is why I am saying that it would be worth saving right now even for this moment to see where and if it would develop from this point forward.
If you don’t know your daughter very well and she really hasn’t shared any photos or texts or emails or seeker ads with you, then you really don’t have any real clues. The best thing to do is to talk to your daughter and ask her about her GPS role in the relationship.
Are there hidden expectations on her part? One of the reasons I would talk to your daughter is to find out if there are hidden expectations on her part. People do sometimes “leak” data through neglected or faceless thoroughgoings; a Google Search of “gestures’ via her Facebook page or Google alert for “dropped gauges” will likely uncover such hidden expectations. Make sure that you and your daughter both give the other an opportunity to get to know one another; you might think that driving to meet her might be such a simple thing to do, but it can often be a mistake in judgment. You see, people really do get dropped gauges all the time.
