Spending my adult life without a father has made me resent the phrase “daddy issues” and how cavalierly it is thrown around to describe women with absent, deceased or toxic fathers. Apparently, a complicated relationship with your father is all anyone needs to explain your questionable taste in men, your need for validation, or your attraction to older partners. Freud could never.I’ve been on the receiving end of this armchair psychoanalysis a few times, through no fault of my hero dad. I’ve watched self-proclaimed therapists look at me with pity-filled eyes, as though they’d uncovered a tragic backstory that explained everything about me. For some ineligible bachelors, my supposed daddy issues were an excellent opportunity to position themselves as the emotionally stable man in the equation. Nothing says a healthy male ego quite like diagnosing a woman you’ve barely gotten to know.Like much of the vocabulary used in dating and matchmaking, the phrase turns women’s preferences into pathologies. Dislike a man, and you’re either intimidated by masculinity or looking for your father. Damned if you do, daddy issues if you don’t.For most of my adult life, I wanted to disprove this theory. Little did these amateur therapists know that my now-deceased father may be the very reason I have what I like to call anti-daddy issues.Also Read | ‘Baal nahi banwane kya?’: I’m 27, and my mom still does my hair every nightWhat exactly is a woman without a patriarch?“Daddy issues” is a remarkably convenient diagnosis. A woman is too loud, too opinionated, too sexually liberated or too unwilling to entertain a man’s nonsense? Perhaps she has daddy issues. “Fatherless behaviour” is another favourite, flung at women who refuse to behave themselves — where “behave” really means being quieter, more accommodating and less threatening to male egos. The implication is that a woman who hasn’t been raised under a man’s watchful eye must have missed some crucial instruction in how to be a woman. Who will keep her in line? Who will make sure she knows her place?The supposed counter, “mommy issues”, is often used to mock men who are excessively attached to their mothers. But a man’s closeness to his mother can also be framed as evidence of his capacity for love and loyalty. A woman’s complicated relationship with her father, meanwhile, is often treated as a warning label for prospective partners. Neither stereotype is particularly fair, but women seem especially likely to be made to answer for their upbringing before they’ve even had the chance to introduce themselves.Simone de Beauvoir explored this imbalance in The Second Sex, arguing that man is positioned as the default human subject, while woman becomes the “Other” — defined in relation to him rather than as an autonomous individual. The idea feels especially relevant to how women are discussed in dating circles.Story continues below this adA woman’s personality needs an explanation, her preferences need a cause, and her independence needs a backstory. Even her relationship with her father becomes a tool for interpreting her relationship with the world. Men, meanwhile, are more readily allowed to exist as individuals, with their preferences and shortcomings treated as their own.I began thinking about this differently after my father died. I was barely out of my teenage years, and still completing my undergraduate degree when my family lost the man many people would have considered its patriarch. In the middle of our grief, some relatives offered practical solutions for our suddenly fatherless household. We could sell our electronics. We could sell the home we’d lived in for three decades and move somewhere cheaper. My mother could get a job to help sustain the family.Perhaps some of these suggestions came from genuine concern about our finances. Losing a parent can be economically devastating. But what stayed with me was how quickly our future became a problem to be solved by shrinking our lives. Our belongings, our home, our way of living — everything seemed up for reconsideration because the man of the house was no longer around.I was grieving my father. My mother, grieving her husband. Yet we also had to contend with the possibility that other people no longer considered us equipped to decide what happened to our own lives. Within weeks of his death, while still a student, I began working to help sustain my family. I didn’t suddenly become capable because a man had left the household. I had been capable all along.Story continues below this adIt made me wonder how often a woman’s life is interpreted through a man’s presence or absence rather than her own abilities. If a father is supposed to protect, provide and prepare his daughters for the world, why does his absence invite assumptions that they cannot manage without him? Why must a woman carry an invisible deficit into adulthood simply because she grew up without a father?Do women really have daddy issues? I think not. The problem is that we’ve become so accustomed to measuring women against the men in their lives that we struggle to imagine them outside that relationship.Also Read | What if Ishaan from Taare Zameen Par had no hidden talent?How my father gave me anti-daddy issuesMy father was ordinary, like countless working-class men who migrate from smaller cities to metros in search of a better life. He was hardworking, honest and fiercely loyal to his family. He wanted to give his children the education and opportunities he might not have had himself. By patriarchy’s rather simplistic definition, he was a traditional man: he worked to provide for his family and took his responsibilities seriously. But he never made our lives smaller to make his own feel bigger.Raising two daughters was a matter of pride for him, never a compromise or a burden. He taught us to prioritise our careers over marriage, to be honest in our work, and to be loyal to our families and friends. He taught us to take responsibility, show up for people we loved and earn our place in the world. In many ways, he taught us how to be “traditional men”.Story continues below this adI grew up watching my father live the life I live now. He worked through the week and hosted house parties on weekends. Every so often, he’d pull an all-night rager with close friends and family, fuelled by 2000s Bollywood songs and questionable dance moves. He was the life of every party, loudly and unapologetically. He knew how to work hard, love his people and have a good time.Unknowingly, I adopted the same split personality. A breezy, unapologetic party person on weekends; a responsible, toned-down employee through the week.He also set standards I didn’t fully recognise until I grew older. I remember being a pre-teen drama queen with an aversion to ethnic wear, like many girls that age. My mother could never understand why I refused to wear a kurta to a relative’s wedding. My father, meanwhile, bought me the most expensive mini-dresses he could afford, one for every wedding function. All he ever wanted was for his girls to be comfortable.Years later, when I step out in something airy or low-cut, the judgmental stares and comments still follow, from men and women alike. But somewhere in the back of my mind is the memory of a father who thought I looked beautiful and saw no reason to make me feel otherwise. It’s difficult to be entirely unsettled by strangers’ opinions when the first man whose opinion mattered never made me feel ashamed of myself.Story continues below this adWe didn’t always agree. As I grew older, my father and I found ourselves on opposite sides of the political spectrum. He was a stubborn boomer; I was a stubborn, know-it-all teenager. Arguments over primetime news could get heated, and neither of us was particularly good at backing down. But he never used his position as my father to silence me. He never made disagreement an act of disobedience or treated his authority as the final word.That, to me, is what made him different. He could be a traditional man without expecting traditional obedience from his daughters. He could disagree with me without diminishing me. He could raise two daughters without treating our independence as a threat to his authority.This is why I have what I call anti-daddy issues. My standards for men might be unrealistically high, but not because I’m looking for my father in every man I meet, as some ineligible bachelors might like to believe. It’s because my father, a boomer and a fairly ordinary man who wasn’t particularly well-read or given to intellectual debates, managed to understand things that men my age, armed with urban sophistication and all the right vocabulary, still seem to struggle with. He didn’t need to call himself progressive to let his daughters be independent, or dress up his insecurities as concern. He learnt what he knew from life, and somehow, that was enough to make him more forward-thinking than many of the men I encounter in Delhi today.My father taught me to be what society has long expected a traditional man to be: independent, ambitious, responsible and unapologetic about taking up space. The irony is that he never needed me to be a man, or anyone other than myself, to live up to those standards.