That's men for you: Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health
I believe there is enormous love between fathers and their daughters. Yet there are obstacles that get in the way of that love.
One is the father's work. Perhaps you are a daughter who would say that your father was so fond of his work that he had little time for his family or for you.
The reality may have been that your father worked many long hours at a job he did not particularly like to provide for you and the other people in your family.
When children are growing up, they do not necessarily realise that parents work because they have to. To them, no doubt, it appears that parents work because that is what they would rather be doing.
If either parent leaves the workforce to be with the children, it is likely to be the mother, which reinforces the image of the father as the parent who loves to be out at work. Yet, the father may be staying at work, not out of his love of the job, but to pay the mortgage.
The fact is that the man you, the daughter, thought was married to money and to work, may in reality have been married to his family. That may be the explanation for the long hours at the factory or the office. In reality, he might have preferred to spend his time with you but the harsh economic facts were - and are - that he could not do that.
As a daughter, you might also have been fed up with hearing your father laying down the law. "If you do not work hard at school, you will not get a decent job and what will become of you?" and so on and so forth.
Yet, you know, the things he is saying to you and that you find overbearing and domineering may be things he says to prepare you for the day when he will not be around to smooth the way or pay the bills.
According to Prof Linda Nielsen, who runs a course on fathers and daughters at Wake Forest University in the US (her website is www.wfu.edu/~nielsen/fanddcourse.htm but, yes, it might be easier just to google her), daughters rarely talk to their fathers about issues such as the break-up of marriages.
If the parents' marriage breaks up, the daughter will discuss it with the mother but not with her father. Yet, Prof Nielsen points out, the majority of fathers in marriage break-ups are not living the life of the jolly bachelor. In fact, they suffer a great deal from the loss of family life.
So, if you are the daughter of a father who has been divorced from your mother, a conversation about how he feels about the whole thing might deepen your relationship with him.
But perhaps girls do not want to talk about such things to their fathers? What Prof Nielsen has found out is that, by and large, daughters want to talk to their fathers about relationships, love and all the other things that we all too often presume is a woman's domain.
And fathers want a closer relationship with their daughters. However, they do not always know how to go about this and when they do, their daughters sometimes reject them seeing matters of the heart as totally outside their father's domain.
But, you know, fathers have been in love too, have known the pain of loss, have striven to do what they can for those who mean the most to them. And those who mean most to them, very often, are their daughters.
So, fathers and daughters, open up the lines of communication. And, daughters, here is a question suggested by Prof Nielsen: when did you last talk to your father when it was not about money?
Fathers have hearts too, you know. So, daughters, take another look at your old man. He might be more like you than you think.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
