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.…