Did you ever get the feeling your parents don't love you?

Sure. No sane mother would love me and my brother, or not regret for having us at least once on her life.

@Sneki2 oh, come on you can’t he serious! What on earth is wrong with you?

No, but I do think that I was switched at birth…

In the late 70s in a small town in Oklahoma, my parents told me that if I was gay, they would disown me and kick me out of the house. After 30 years of therapy, I am healed. I call my parents on the weekends and talk about the weather. We never talk about any particular man I might be seeing.

Your issues are serious. Your pain from this situation is real. Is there another adult you can talk to? It’s best if it’s someone who is not emotionally invested in your family. A therapist would be ideal, or a school counselor.

I’m suggesting you talk to someone for a simple reason. Your relationship with your father is causing you pain. It’s creating a wound. The wound must heal, and the sooner you do the work to heal it, the better you will be in your life. If you do not heal it, it will haunt you until you have no choice but to confront it.

“I try to make myself smarter, funnier, more outgoing. Anything to make him proud.” These are you current attempts to heal your pain. I’m sorry to be blunt, but they won’t work.

Talking about your wound is one of the best ways to heal it.

@Sunshinegirl11 I understand you want to have a connection with your father. Do all the things you say you do to compete, but not to win him over, just do them to make yourself grow. Why living to please others when you can live to please yourself :)

@flameboi Be careful there, or you might have to pay a royalty to Rick Nelson’s estate.

@Sunshinegirl11 I don’t want to sound trite, but your dad is only human. I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t like him if I met him…..but this isn’t about me.

Like all of us men, he can be a little dense at times. Have you tried to speak privately (and quietly) about how his behavior makes you feel ?? You may be surprised by how shocked he is at how much he has hurt you, and then (rightfully) will ask for your forgiveness.

P.S. At some time, as you grow older, you will hear the expression “All men are jerks”.

That’s because…...well…...we are…...

Is it possible to spend time alone with your Dad – just the two of you? Would he respond to a request from you saying you miss him and would to do something special with him?

I don’t. The most I ever had was apprehensions of how they might react to something, which in practice always turned out to be just an irrational fear of mine with no basis.

I’ve seen and heard of some pretty extreme crappy behavior from other people’s parents towards their own kids, though. Many people get extremely self-absorbed in many ways, and become emotionally unavailable in various flavors. It might not (often? ever?) amount to actual “don’t love the kid”, but in practice it can be worse that that, it seems to me.

It’s too bad our culture puts so much stake in the biological family and is often so lacking in good supportive community and friendship relationships.

@Zephyra I am quite serious.
I forgot to aswer the question, though.
@OP There’s no point on stressing yourself over for someone’s attention, only to watch them ignore you. Live, love, have fun, enjoy life. Trying to win someone’s love will only set you through pain and misery. Remove those shackled in and live free. If he’s not interested in you, you can’t really help it. Let it go and love someone who will love you back.

I don’t think his behavior is about love.
I used to talk with my daughter about her dreams, and goals, and she was little, so I let her just prattle away.
Now that she is halfway through high school, those talks go differently. She has great goals and intentions, but her planning is somewhat flawed. She thinks I am a mean mom for pointing out her ideas which seem to meoverly optimistic, or not well timed.
She doesn’t like my feedback, so she won’t discuss those things much with me, then she complains we don’t talk enough.
Could it be your dad is sort of doing the same thing?
Maybe your situation is way different, but the way you described how your relationship used to be sounded familiar to me.
It gets tough, at a certain stage, to communicate between teens and parents.
As parents, we can remember the pain of early mistakes, the frustration of miscalculations. We want to prepare our teens for the things they don’t realize should be factored in. Meanwhile, teens have been in school most of their lives. They have been working, and learning, and at some point it feels like they have learned so much they are bursting with it.
Unfortunately, being done with school does not mean a person is ready to get everything right. It only means they have probably learned enough to fix some of their mistakes.

Here is another point. Your dad spent your whole life loving you. He may be just dense enough to not realize how important reminders can be. His girlfriend and her daughter are fairly new to him, and he probably feels some pressure to establish his feelings toward them.

I believe you need to discuss your feelings with him. As was already mentioned, he will likely be unaware he has made you feel this way.

I think it sounds like the two of you have a healthy relationship which just needs a little nurturing right now.

Love is hard to define. Maybe my parents love me so much however I can feel little about it.

Your dad loves you.

Maybe tell your dad you want to spend time with him, and ask him what he thinks will be fun for both of you. For some men it’s difficult to have things in common with their daughters. Their interests are very different, but that has zero to do with whether he loves you or not.

@flameboi – I tell the same thing to my mother just to tease her some time…) Never felt the way op is describing about her parents.

People change in response to people around them. My Dad has always been aloof. When he married again his new wife was quite aloof and judgemental too. Then he died. His wife became a completely different person after that. Much friendlier and approachable’ actually affectionate now.
It is what it is. I couldn’t even have small talk with my Dad, much less anything deep. I had called him one Sunday just to talk (by this time they had moved 1000 miles away) and he impatiently said ‘Don’t call me just to chit chat! Only call if you have something specific to tell me!”
Then a year later he got on me for never calling!
It is what it is.

“Did you ever get the feeling your parents don’t love you?”
No. Not for a second, not even when we were passionately angry with each other for various reasons. Lord knows I did enough things to make them disappointed in me, and they expressed that readily enough: disappointed in some foolish act or outcome, that is, but not really disappointed “in me”.

So I can’t quite identify, except…

My son has felt this way with me, I think. We’ve recently seemed to mend our relationship to a great degree, but it hasn’t been easy, and it has taken longer than I would have liked.

I came from a stable family. My parents had been together for fifty years at the time that they died within a few months of each other. On the other hand, I separated from my wife – my son’s and daughter’s mother – when they were in their late teens. At the time, my daughter was also having a rift with her mother, and my son felt a certain loyalty to his mother, so he went with her. (We hadn’t actually decided upon “a legal separation” or divorce or custody arrangements; we just did what seemed best at the time.) Neither of the kids know all of the interpersonal details between my wife and me that led to the separation – and in deference to her and to maintain a confidence that I believe any gentleman owes to his wife – I didn’t fill them in on all details, even though doing so would have made me look better than I did.

So my son spent a little over a year with my wife, who apparently felt a certain amount of betrayal and bitterness that she frequently expressed – to him – about me, and he came to resent me, but we never really talked about that. I don’t know the details that he heard, but I know that he held a lot of bitterness towards me over the fact of the separation, which greatly upset him.

Having been raised, myself, in a fairly non-demonstrative New England family of long standing tradition – that is, a long-standing tradition of “stiff upper lip” and a certain self-suppression of emotion (and affection) – it was difficult for me to reconcile with my son. And to compound things, he has been living mostly on the other side of the continent, so it’s more difficult to visit him and his family than it is to visit my daughter. So it took a long time to get over most of our difference and difficulties. I think we have managed, mostly, but it’s still difficult for me to maintain silence about some of the things about our marriage that could have changed his view of me more easily.

Let me ask you this (rhetorically), in light of all that: Is it possible that you harbor some resentment of your father based on the divorce, in which he removed himself (or “was removed”) from your life? If he were writing the question, would he use somewhat the same wording about you that you have used about him? That is, does he perceive that you may be silently judging him and finding him wanting? Are you disappointed in his behavior? Disappointed in his ability to move on and find happiness in a new family?

I’m not saying that you’re wrong about any of this – even if I knew you well enough to make the judgment it’s unlikely that I would ever express it so openly – but how do you suppose your father feels about the emotional gulf between the two of you? and Have you ever thought of asking him about it directly?

Never, not once.

My father never even pretended to love me, and I didn’t care. He paid the bills, we ate pretty well, the house was warm in winter, and nobody ever came to the door about past-due bills.

So for that I thank you, sir….

He died in 1998, and the world became a much better place for everyone on that day.

Not to sound trite, but sometimes…..that’s just the way it goes…...

Ultimately, it’s your dad’s responsibility to be a good parent. If you don’t feel like he’s proud of you, that is a failing on his part, not yours.

Yes, it hurts. That hurt doesn’t really stop, in my experience, but it can be muted for long periods of time. I suggest following Jake’s advice.

I guess this is where I prove things can be worse….

My dad hated my sister and was a massive dick. He used to do shit like we would get Taco Bell for dinner and say my sister couldn’t have any since she was fat and hand her rice cakes. So my mom would hand him a half-rack and sneak off to IHOP and get us fatter once he passed out.

And one time my sister was forced on a scale and he said her weight was “unacceptable” and slammed her head into the bathtub until there was blood all over the place. Fuck off dad!!

So eventually it got worse and my mom shot my dad in the forehead.

But back to my mom. I live ten miles away from her. And last night she emailed with some mom nonsense I normally reply to with “OKAY”. But I said I was going to be gone for about a hour since I was going to head out to do laundry.

And I did go to do laundry. So I was sitting in the laundromat and up walks my mom. My shit had like 10 minutes left. And I was actually pretty pissed she drove across town to a laundromat three blocks away from my apartment.

For some reason she thought I had done all my laundry. No mother, I am not stupid. I just did what I could fit in my backpack. I am not dragging home ten bags of clothes. I just did enough to get me through the next few days.

But she did drive me home. And on the way home she asked if I wanted Wendy’s.

And fuck yes I want bacon cheeseburgers.

I was actually kinda pissed since i wanted dollar menu ones and she did this. I’m still shocked you can get a $5.50 burger at Wendy’s. It is barely better than the dollar menu one.

I guess my point is my mother is trying to fatten me up for Thanksgiving.

I think almost everyone feels this way about their parents at some point. Thankfully, it’s usually not true! However, with my father, it was true and I went no-contact with him when my mother died. My life has been much better since.

I’m not sure how old you are, but I know that for whatever reason, some fathers struggle to connect to their teenaged daughters. You’re not his “little girl” anymore and are becoming your own person. Change can be hard for some parents and it’s possible that this is just a phase.

It’s also possible that he’s just a dick and prefers his “new” family for whatever reason. Maybe he sees you as a reminder of his past marriage—and his own personal failings in that regard. From the way you write, you seem like a lovely person, but you may also be a people-pleaser. It’s hard but sometimes we must accept that we cannot please everyone and trying to do so will only drain our energy.

Chin up, hun. Focus on those in your life who can give back what you give them.

@johnpowell Your father sounds so much like mine that it’s eerie. Unfortunately, mine still walks this Earth. Well…limps as far as I know.

Yes.

@LeavesNoTrace :: This was really hard for me since the girl I was dating in high school had a best friend that had parents that did the same. And we were all friends. We would go to the friends house during lunch to drink a few glasses of wine and eat pizza.

The weird thing is friends parents had two fridges and had a padlock on theirs. And also padlocks on the cabinets. It was the same shit just the low-fat variant in the unlocked fridge/cabinets.

And here is where it gets even more absurd. The girl whose parents did this had a car and a job. She was totally capable of acquiring all the Arbys she could shove down her gullet.

And the friend in question was in no way overweight. I think it was some weird power-play or something. Like you behaved today so enjoy this hot-pocket without the fat removed.