AS MY OWN experience proved, one of the clearest and yet most confusing trends is that of single women suddenly committing to serious relationships in the years immediately following the death of our fathers. To get at the reasons behind this mass movement into commitment, we must examine how this loss influences both who we choose and how we conduct ourselves in relationships. Digging deeper, we can explore our changes in expectations and the evolution of some of our fears, dreams, and perceptions.

YOU CAN have any kind of wedding you want. " My father used to say with numbing regularity when we had his favorite melon for dessert. " You can have a Muslim wedding. You can have a Buddhist wedding. You can even (and this, him being a Jew, was a stretch) have a Catholic wedding, " he would say. " But you can’t elope! " With that he’d dig his spoon into the orange-fleshed melon of his punchline and chuckle to himself. I would groan, and my mother would usually laugh softly in a supportive manner. He loved his jokes so much, and so many of them were so bad.

I was still single when he died, but my unmarried status never seemed to frustrate my parents as it did me. I never felt the pressure to get married or to start a family that other women report. I never felt scorn from them, or the anxiety that I was somehow adrift without a mate. Except for those times when he got as wound up in my heartbreaks as I did, I thought of my father as basically content with life. I told myself he was happily married and happy to stay out of my affairs. But after he died, I realized that I really had no clue about his feelings on marriage or about my seemingly endless string of brief relationships. I realized that I had assumed too much, and that I knew very little about my parents’ marriage, or about my father as a husband.

My mother rarely talked about my father for the first few years after he passed away, at least not to me. She did not say his name or refer to him. His jokes did not get repeated, and his jovial bonhomie seemed forgotten. For the first few years after his death it was as if he had never existed, except that the vortex of pain around any mention of him made its pull felt in too many conversations.

I suspected one reason why, back in those silent times, my mother chose not to go too near that tugging grief. I knew that his sick years, particularly the final one, had drained her, replaced a load of good memories with bitter ones. And that his half-hearted try at suicide when the pain from the cancer grew too much to bear left her feeling guilty and outgunned. " We’ll always have Paris, " he had joked, weakly, when he came to in the emergency room. But that was as good as it was going to get again. As his lucid hours shrank to minutes, I think she felt relieved, as well, as the constant waiting drew to a close. And I suspect her guilt over this relief mounted in his final days, magnified by her decision to call an ambulance for him and exacerbated as his soft fondness grew distant, confused, and then angry.

And so his memory lay like a great, sinking presence between us whenever I went over to her house for dinner. We had developed an irregular custom of having dinner together on Sunday evenings after my parents had retired to a condo near me. And as she and I carefully, gingerly, resumed this custom after his death, I wondered what kind of marriage my parents had had. Before his death, I had only seen the side of him that was devoted to her — devoted to us all, really, although his love could take the kind of clumsy action that made itself more dear by intent. But as I questioned my own relationship with him and my ties to the men who had come and gone in my life, I was beginning to see the shadows behind the bad jokes and silly stories, the bruises inflicted by his brand of lumbering love.

Since he’d died, for example, I had never seen my mother wearing the big gold and diamond earrings he’d given her for their twenty-fifth anniversary. Even I, then a child, could have warned him off their ungraceful anchor-shaped design, their awkward and heavy cut. Was she disappointed when she opened the box, hoping for something beautiful and sparkling that would reflect the years she had stood faithfully by him? Did she feel guilty for not loving such a pricey gift? She never let me know. She wore them for every big occasion, loyally donning them for doctors’ dances and nights at the opera. But after his death, they never again pulled down her ears. Sentiment, memories of love lost, can be painful, I thought at first.

Early on, I had my own experiences of his misguided generosity, a spirit that I told myself was large and kind but perhaps did not accurately perceive the objects of its desire. There was, for example, the Partridge Family record he gave me for my eleventh birthday. I’d wanted it since it came out, but I had been saving up for months and had, in fact, already bought it. My mother must have been with me at its purchase — how else would I have gotten to the Modell’s record counter, a car-ride away? But she had not been consulted, and when he presented it to me she kept quiet as I thanked him and feigned glee. Nor did she say anything when I smuggled my own copy out of my room, later, and hid it in the attic, for fear that he would see the duplication when he came up to kiss me goodnight. He meant well, I told myself, and he tried so hard, which I venture she also told herself as she opened her jewelry box, as she fingered the catch on those heavy bejeweled anchors. How fragile was this man, that we found ourselves protecting him? Or were there other factors at work?

She hadn’t always colluded to keep him happy. She hadn’t always censored herself. I remember coming home from what must have been my first year away at summer camp. My parents took me straight from the camp bus to my favorite pizza parlor. I was telling them stories about my adventures, I recall, and he was looking through the sugar packets stacked in their metal holder. I paused, and he pulled out one with a picture of a bird to show me. " It’s a blue bird, just for you, " he said, handing me the packet. " Oh, she’s a big girl now, " I remember my mom said, gently pushing his hand away, and I remember the disappointment on his face as he restacked the pretty packet. She thought, I am sure, that she was saving my newfound dignity. That I did not want to be bothered by such babyish things at the grand age of eight. Maybe I would have been embarrassed by him, had she not intervened. But what I remember now is that my father was reaching out to me, sweetly and on what he believed were my terms. I was angry at her for correcting him, and even then wanted to comfort him for trying.

Before my father died, I had always believed my parents had a good marriage. I had seen how devoted my father was to my mother: the flowers he would bring her on birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries; the obvious pride he took in the way she looked all done up for their big nights out. I wanted someone to look at me that way, to treat me that way. It seemed strange to me that until my father died I was unable to find that kind of mate, to cement that kind of a caring, loving relationship.

It wasn’t as if I spent much of my twenties and early thirties alone. And whenever I became involved with a man my commitment was — at least for the duration — total. " Can’t you wait awhile? " I remember one friend complaining, exasperated, when some new beau beckoned. " You’re going to start seeing him, and then we’ll never get to hang out anymore. "

I thought she was being silly. Didn’t most of our circle tend toward serial monogamy, bringing first one man and then another to our parties and to see the bands we all followed in Boston’s lively circuit of clubs? Besides, as she could have pointed out, most of the time I got too caught up in a man he proved to be bad for me. Smart and mean was my usual downfall. Often these men were critics from the publications where I worked. I told myself that I liked them because they were journalists like myself. But I deliberately overlooked the fact that they made their living pinpointing the flaws and weaknesses in others’ works, and eventually, in their cool, dispassionate ways, in me as well, dissecting my taste, my figure, my friends, and my lifestyle as clinically and heartlessly as if it were some stranger’s packaged offering. When I was at my most honest, I could admit that this same discrimination, this sometime snobbishness, was part of their appeal. I felt honored when they chose me, and thus had to accept their judgment when they finally rejected me. And reject me they did, for as many reasons as there were men.

There was O., who hounded me to lose weight and — with equal vehemence — to write in a more stripped-down style, as if I could be tougher and leaner and still be myself. There was M., for whom I was overly emotional, and C., to whom I was not sensitive enough, or so he said. As one girlfriend pointed out, back when I was too disconsolate to listen, I sought out the type of guys who claimed to know me better than I knew myself. The kind who wanted to make me " better, " or remake me in the image of their ideal. The problem was, she could have added, they weren’t always generous with how they used this information.

Not all of my boyfriends were like that, although even I recognized the pattern as I drifted from my twenties to my thirties and saw my friends form more permanent alliances. Sometimes I ran across a true sweetheart, but these relationships never seemed to last either. From these, however, I could have learned something about my own weaknesses. I remember one man in particular, whom I started seeing a few months after one of my sharp cads had dumped me publicly, in the middle of a cocktail party. Rob was the opposite of the cool, cruel type. He was romantic and affectionate. And if he wasn’t exactly career track, with his low-fi band, his slacker friends, and his hourly wage job, at least he was generous with what he had. He gave me flowers, more often carnations than roses, and he never stinted on hugs and approval, all of which went far toward making me feel like a whole human being again.

We’d been seeing each other for a few months when I finally decided to introduce him to my parents. Yes, I was nervous about their reaction, but I reassured myself that all would be well. My parents were open minded. They were modern. And if Rob didn’t mind that I had the better paying job, the newer car, why should they? After hearing my sob stories, and seeing me retreat to the family home for long, weepy weekends after one breakup or another, they should be glad that I was seeing a man who truly cared for me. Rob, I had told them often enough, made me happy.

The evening, as I recall, started off well. Rob was very willing to meet my folks. He was ready to talk about chess with my father and music with my mother. He offered to help in the kitchen in the open, friendly way that to me had always indicated a lack of pretense and a real interest in the lives of others.

That interest was not reciprocated. Although I cannot remember at what point in the evening I first noticed it, I clearly remember the bands of tension tightening around my chest. I saw my father closing down. He did not need to say anything. I could tell by the way his mouth set too tightly, his lips slightly pursed, that he had made up his mind. All the emotional support Rob had given to me didn’t count for much. I felt my breath going shallow, my face growing flushed. And when I looked back at Rob, I too saw the worn spots in his jeans and the way his long hair hung, somewhat disarrayed, over his collar. I no longer noticed how warm he was, how willing to engage them on their turf. I heard what was missing in his conversation, how the joking references he and I shared sounded silly and childish, and I almost hated him for not being more restrained, more formal. More like my father. I don’t think I ever looked at him with quite the same affection again.

If we are being honest with ourselves, most of us will usually admit to some connection between the men we choose to love (if indeed men are the objects of our desire) and the first man who loves us. He may look like our father, or he may possess other traits that we attributed to him, and for many of us the similarity is irresistible. " The first man I was really attracted to was just like my father — tall, dark, handsome, aloof — and with that same ability to see my soul, " one woman tells me. " I hung onto him like a rodeo rider. " Conversely, we may react against our dads, seeking men who seem utterly different. " Any man who was remotely like my father would repulse me utterly, " another woman explains. Either way, our dads hover over our relationships.

How could they not? According to every theorist, back to Freud, our fathers are the first love of the opposite sex, the basis of every romantic relationship we have in later life. These partners may be very different from our fathers, but our emotions toward them may be more about our fathers than about the mates we tell ourselves we have freely chosen. And what we believe are the free impressions of our heart may in fact be shadows, impressing upon us with their darkness the shape of the object that has obscured the sun.

Clea Simon reads from Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads (Wiley, 2001) at the Brookline Booksmith, in Brookline, on October 18 at 7 p.m. Call (617) 566-6660. She also reads at WordsWorth Books, in Cambridge, on October 30 at 7 p.m. Call (617) 354-5201. Clea Simon can be reached at cleas@earthlink.net

Issue Date: October 11 - 18, 2001