Most days it feels a very regrettable thing that my father lives on the other side of the country. Here I sit in Maine, marooned by distance and circumstances, while he and my mom are basted by the sun of Arizona. There is always a calamity for me to deal with, usually involving spark plugs or water heaters, that my dad would prove his fatherly merit in solving if he were here — mostly because he wouldn’t start his plan of attack by asking, “Can you please use the word spark plug in a sentence because the origin of the word didn’t help?”
On top of the material problems, there are the emotional disasters, the days that I want to retreat under the covers as I would have as a teenager to wither until my dad coaxed me into the light of day with promises of movies and Mexican food. His distance has felt unfair and unreasonable over the years.
Or, it did until this weekend when I read a New York Magazine interview of a girl who is dating her father. Suddenly I was really glad that mine is far away — or geographically undesirable, as it were.
I approached the article cautiously, suspicious of the story’s title — What It’s Like To Date Your Dad — figuring it a more proverbial proffering than an actual one, certainly not a romantic one. After all, I tend to assign the traits I have loved in the men of my past a likeness to those that I love in my father. I wanted to give the daughter in this scenario more credit than the title had, a tawdry string of words deliberately crafted to make a reader spit her croissant across the room. What did I learn? I give daughters who date their fathers too much credit because they are, in fact, dating their dads.
As I pored over the article, a familiar feeling settled over me, an awareness that I had dabbled in these kind of scenarios before in the fictionalized tales of V.C. Andrews. Just as I had in grade school, when reading those books under the cover of my desk in the back of the classroom, I felt my inner warning bells start to clang.
Hey, young Southern woman abandoned on the doorstep of town’s most well-to-do lady by whom she was raised in an austere and loveless manner! That genteel and dapper gentleman, with the eyes nestled in just enough creases to look wise but still friendly? That guy? That’s your dad! You just don’t know it yet, and you won’t until you’re expecting a child made of DNA that is unfortunately similar!
The case featured in this story was a bit different because there was no well-heeled matriarch, no duplicitous cover-ups of identity, and no debutante balls. There was just a girl and her dad, sent into far-away orbits by divorce and other tough breaks, reunited at the onset of her adulthood with all the well-meaning intentions of family — well, family who likes to do more than criticize each others’ pants sizes and life choices.
The author of the article is quick to quote the daughter’s claims that their love is consensual and respectful and never rooted in abuse. The author weaves in psychological citations to establish a precedent for this kind of love-story-gone-wrong, and the phenomenon described is given the name GSA, Genetic Sexual Attraction, a scarcely studied thing that aims to define the intense romantic feelings that can occur between relatives. While it seemed flimsy scientifically, it did summon something anecdotally as I recalled my own brush with GSA. I was seven; He was eight. He was something of an actor. He wore silk kimonos and steamed his pores. He had no regard for the dictums of our parents regarding appropriate consumption of sugar and the distance from which to sit in front of the TV. He was older, wiser, clearly a risk-taker, and also, my first cousin. And if asked by my friends in the schoolyard who I would one day marry, I flipped my hair and said unabashed, “My cousin, Quinn.”
The difference between my GSA and that described in the essay is that when I first heard, “You can’t marry your cousin. It’s not allowed,” I shrugged my shoulders and decided to marry someone from New Kids On The Block instead. I didn’t soldier on and take my own relative to the prom. That’s right, this girl took her father to the prom, a revelation that made me cringe, thinking of how awkward it must have been for the mother to yell out the door, “Have her home by midnight!” I had always believed, until this story, that I’d had the most unfortunate prom date, an overly tall senior who looked exactly like Bull from Night Court. I can remember swaying to the music, my hands struggling to reach his shoulders while his strained to reach my waist, and thinking that anyone else would have made a better prom date. But, still, not my dad.
The article is worth reading because it’s the sort of thing that gives you pause and makes you wonder what is wrong with humanity and not just in that tongue-clicking way we employ when talking about reality television and the clothing that teenagers wear. This is the sort of thing that deeply unsettles a person and makes you never want to never brush up against another human. Particularly one that is your father.