two years before i met my wife, I had a momentary encounter with a beautiful woman a couple of years my junior. When I say momentary, I mean exactly that.

We'd been in the same business meeting for several hours, during which I'd become irretrievably smitten. She had the face of a classic movie star, and although I had plenty to contribute to the business at hand, my focus returned to her time after time.

After dinner I invited her to accompany me down to the piers where a spectacle of nature was occurring, a migration of sea life that everyone in town was stopping by to see. Of course, at night, we would likely be alone. We went, the two of us, and enjoyed the show, and when the moment was perfect I turned and kissed her. She returned my affection, and for a few minutes I believed all was right with the world. It was also late, and we'd be missed, so we returned to our respective hotels with the promise to get together again as soon as possible.

She did not return my calls after that, so I stopped calling. Years passed, we had polite professional contact from time to time, I married, life goes on. Yet, despite her striking appearance (remarked on by every male who met her), she never attracted a mate, though there was occasional talk of a boyfriend somewhere. She is now in her late 30s, still single, still stunning.

It is no mystery that a woman like that would have nothing to do with me. But I did puzzle over why she did in the first place, and why no one else has—to my knowledge—ever acted as I did and then followed through.

Yesterday I had occasion to see her family photos, which were on public display. I scanned them and picked out her mother, at least one sister or two, no brothers, and ... no father.

Then it all made sense.

i don't know the story of why he is, literally, not in the picture. But his absence confirmed what I have observed over many years, which is that a girl who grows up without a father—which is to say, a positive, loving, constant, masculine presence—will in all likelihood find herself unable to form a healthy relationship with a man. She may become an unwed mother, eternal spinster, serial divorceé, prostitute, or lesbian. But what is certain is that there will be a serious dysfunction in her relations with men. This occurs even when a father exists but doesn't live up to the four adjectives preceding "presence" above—positive, loving, constant, masculine.

The 1970s taught us that divorce is better for the children than a "loveless" marriage. Some of us have always known that was counterintuitive, but in that era we didn't get our turn at the mic. Perhaps, also, that knowledge wasn't as easy to articulate as the rhetoric of liberation. It didn't fit the narrative of the times.

Before divorce (and its related illness, children born out of wedlock) became routine, there was always the possibility of a child growing up fatherless for any number of reasons beyond parental control—premature death and warfare, primarily—but a child could apprehend those in time. And I'm not a romantic for believing there are men who would be honored to step in where life had dealt a mother a cruel blow. What we can't keep up with is the volume of broken marriages, and the damage done to the innocent.

Children can come to accept the death of a parent. What their conscience cannot reconcile is that they were created by an act of love, then deliberately abandoned.

This is why marriage exists, is revered, and continues to form the foundation of every healthy human being.

I hope, for my daughter's sake, that I can practice all this as well as I can identify it.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 07:35 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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