When a girl is born, she shines under the light of her mother through their sacred bond. As a toddler, she moves away from that union toward her father to develop her independence. Come adolescence, daughters usually re-join their mothers to find their femininity and learn an important lifelong lesson: that in order to feel satisfied throughout life, women need to go within themselves to find their happiness, an important evolution in becoming a well-rounded woman. But for those daughters who grew up in a complex family dynamic, where they did not re-bond with Mom and remained under Dad’s influence, they grow up to be Daddy’s Girls.
What’s a Daddy’s Girl?
Joseph and Sarah Elizabeth Malinak, life coaches and a married couple, met when they were working on their individual masculinity and femininity in a self-growth development program. Sarah learned her Daddy’s Girl skills at an early age and took care of men. When she and Joseph met, she was focused on coming from a quieter space in her femininity.
In their new book, Getting Back to Love: When the Pushing and Pulling Threaten to Tear You Apart, Sarah and Joseph explore the idea that Daddy’s Girls become women who relate to men in an imbalanced manner. By never rejoining with their mothers in adolescence, and remaining aligned with their fathers, Daddy’s Girls find fulfillment later in life by taking care of men. This behavior can move to the extremes on either end of the Daddy’s Girl spectrum, which manifests in two ways. The woman either becomes the submissive wife or girlfriend who acts like a servant and accommodates her husband’s needs before her own, or she becomes dominant, bosses her man around, scolds him in public, corrects his sentences, or second guesses many of his decisions. Dominating him stunts him and this allows her to take care of him by making him into the man that she wants. When she’s stuck in this pattern of subservience or domination, the motive to find happiness outside through her partner overshadows the need to take care of herself.
What’s a Mama’s Boy?
As Joseph explained in our phone interview from their home in Asheville, North Carolina, “You’ll never find a Daddy’s Girl without a Mama’s Boy, because they complement each other.” Joseph, a Mama’s Boy, explained that his mother was the primary influence in his life. A Mama’s Boy develops either out of the fact that his father was also a Mama’s Boy or that his father was emotionally distant. During the same pivotal teenage years as a girl, a boy learns how to push or pull on his mother in order to find his freedom, but if Mom hovers, imprisoning her son, and the son doesn’t re-bond with his father through the discovery of danger, power, and freedom, then the son becomes a Mama’s Boy. When this power struggle exists between him and his mother, the Mama’s Boy grows up to believe that he can only find his power by pushing or pulling against women, and fulfillment (like the Daddy’s Girl) is found through women instead of where it resides—as power within himself. When operating from the extremes, a Mama’s Boy might find his power by abusing women physically or emotionally. He might become a sex addict or hop through multiple partners. In the contradictory position, the Mama’s Boy can also begin to depend solely on his woman (insert the dominant Daddy’s Girl) to do it all for him. For the Mama’s Boy, it ultimately comes down to power, and trying to harbor that power by reflecting it off women while in relationship.
When Complements Attract
When the Daddy’s Girl and Mama’s Boy come together, it starts passionate and forms a magnetic attraction that makes getting out of each other’s bed like trying to keep double-sided tape from sticking to itself. Intimacy grows, the couple shares their secrets, and eventually, when the Daddy’s Girl and Mama’s Boy form their union, it progresses into a mirror of the Daddy’s Girl and Mama’s Boy parent-child dynamic.
