Last night I went to a local boxing gym with a good friend and we joined a class of 1 other person. It was the best workout I've ever experienced and I came out feeling great. Even better is that this morning I don't feel like I've been run over by a truck!

I'm just happy that I was actually able to get to the gym / class without a ton of anxiety and I really feel like I can stick it out. Being active feels good... I think I'll keep it.

lil - I never would have expected the papers to have caught anyone's attention, but I suppose I haven't considered the community.

For context, my daughter is 8 and lives with her mother a couple of hours away. My relationship with her mother (my ex-wife) is quite stable and she has re-married.

I started with 'Turning Points of Closeness in the Father/Daughter Relationship' as it was the primary paper recommended to me and makes references to a great number others. I came away from this one with their primary finding, on both sides of the relationship, in my mind - 'the participation in activities together.' They weighed pretty heavily on sports, but i was buoyed by several of the daughter's comments about travel, something I do considerably more than sports. Much of the rest of the paper felt a few years off for me - middle school, university, marriage - but still interesting.

I then switched over to 'The relationship between fatherly affirmation and a woman's self-esteem, fear of intimacy, comfort with womanhood and comfort with sexuality' because while my daughter isn't necessarily at these points in her life, they are something very important to me for her future state. My interaction with those women closest to me marks this one high on the list. That said, the major of the paper's results sort of went over my head. In the end, they proved the critical bits (to me?) of their hypothesis, in that, yep, father's count on the self-esteem and fear of intimacy scales.

I've printed off and still need to read 'Divorced Fathers and Their Daughters: A Review of Recent Research'. I think I came onto this one from the references in the first paper. There were a couple of others I was interested in, but they are behind pay-walls and I haven't decided if I want to pony up just yet.

Anyway... thanks for the interest... hope it wasn't too horrible a wall of text...

Wow - I think you just articulated everything I've ever felt / thought about spoilers. I totally agree with the idea that it takes you out of the "willing suspension of disbelief" and more into evaluating the author's methodology of arrival at the (now known) conclusion. While I suppose that's also interesting, I'm investing my time into the fantasy, not the technical review.

I've just started into the 3rd paper, and it's a heartbreaking list of findings upon findings...

"Whereas only 10% of college students with married parents wondered if their father loved them, more than 30% of those with divorced parents felt this way."

"Receiving too little fathering also leads to more troubled, more unstable romantic relationships later in the daughter's life."

I'll be going over this one for a bit... so many references, I might be at the precipice of quite the rabbit hole...

Oh, by far. I reflect on these statistics and compare them to myself, my partner and my sister. I and my partner came from phenomenally similar, un-divorced households, but our parents were not those to share emotions. I wonder just how much these statistics reflect our own status versus those of divorced parents...

All this said, I'm looking at this 3rd paper as an interesting reflection of our state of divorce, wherein a vast majority of the time the mother is the de-facto custodian, leaving the father in the challenging position to make sure they are spending time with the children. But speaking of rabbit holes...

It's amazing watching her grow up, isn't it? My daughter has introduced my partner and me to bird-watching! We laugh that we've got an old people hobby together, but my daughter was so enthralled by the bird exhibit in the Field Museum (and she's always said she likes birds) that we couldn't help but encourage. It's so amazing to see her personality form and to be able to converse with her on actual mostly-adult subjects.

I'm still reading Post Captain . The first half of the book - almost exactly - was really slow and frustrating with all sorts of half-ass romance BS. When they finally got back on the water, it was great.

I guess you could also count the research papers I read tonight and their big juicy titles. That was a crazy departure from anything I ever do.

I've spent the week in California for work. It was my first flight in a few months and it looks like 2016 might be the year I give up on Delta due to their further watering down of the FF program. Not sure if I can mentally accept the free-for-all seating rush of Southwest, but I suppose that might be my primary domestic option since I'm not sure if the other Delta-esque carriers are much better than Delta.

Last night was a great night for me because I saw my Dutch friend that I met in Tokyo years ago. At the height of the night we had 2 Dutch, 1 American (me), 1 Irish, 1 Israeli, 1 SE Asian. It took me back to Tokyo and the beautiful melting pot of the ex-pat community.

The Israeli and I closed out the bar with amazing conversation, which led me tonight which saw me sitting in the office until 9 reading research papers about father / daughter relationships. It was nice to stretch my brain a bit.

It's so engrossing... it makes you want to sail! But then you think about all the randos on the boat that live a crappy life and think... that's too likely to have been me. Nevermind.

+1 for travel. The benefits of experience are huge.

Writing memoirs sounds pretty interesting. I'm really interested in learning about other people's stories... I sort of want to get into a position where I can actually sit and write some people's stories, but I can't quite figure out the angle.

Wow, that sounds like a terrible name... or an awesome service to keep spirits high.

Oh - good point. Lolita was soooo strange. Imagine being Nabokov and inhabiting that character for so long in order to write the book.