This is a bit of a difficult question to ask because it brings up my own issues around not having a safe or protective father figure. The more I read about the effects this has psychologically, the more I want to avoid recreating it for any future child(ren) I might have. At the same time, I don't want it to seem like I'd condemn any heterosexual or lesbian woman who, for whatever reason, didn't do the same. This is a personal wish of mine that I'm struggling to know how to fulfil, given my experience and outlook.

So, over the last year, my girlfriend and I have been talking more seriously about the logistics of having children, something we'd both take incredibly seriously. One of the things I want to take particularly seriously even though it's difficult for me is the fact that both girls and boys benefit albeit in different ways from having a trustworthy father-like or just male figure in their lives. I have no doubt that when it comes to modelling different (typically) masculine and feminine traits, my partner and I would be covered between us, but the fact remains that seeing these traits modelled by a male seems to have its own separate value. Studies seem to confirm that, in general, without a healthy relationship with a male figure during childhood, boys will be more prone to dangerous behaviour, while girls struggle one way or another in relationships with men, something which both my sister and I demonstrate in very different ways.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that the safe father figure is an irreplaceable concept for girls especially because the nature of being a girl or woman is that no other man can ever have any love for you that isn't grounded in sex. Freudian grossness aside, I think it makes sense to an extent that heterosexual women ‘look for their father’ in male partners because in theory they're looking to see hallmarks of the one man who loved them in a non-sexual way. I'll avoid going into detail but because my father never showed me what this looked like when I was a child, I find it very difficult to believe that there are any decent men in the world.

As an adult, I have never had a male friendship that hasn't devolved in one way or another, either due to the friend being inappropriate or just outing themselves as a misogynist. Given this overall experience, I’m finding myself increasingly torn between being desperate to provide a better role model (in the form of a male family friend) for my children so they don’t have the same issues my sister and I do, and struggling to retain any faith that there is a single good man out there to actually be said role model. After all, if my own biological father didn’t have it in him, how could some random unrelated man.

I’d love to know what any of you think about the subject. If anyone has any truly trustworthy male friends, that’d be really lovely to hear. After all, I’m very much putting this out there because I’d like to have a less bleak outlook on men in general.