I explained to him his daughter was more than likely experiencing abandonment issues and unless he made more of an effort to spend time with her, assuring her he still cared just as much as he had before, she would spend her young adult life chasing after men to fulfill the void she was experiencing due to his absence.
To my surprise he wrote to me after he returned to England and explained the concept to his wife and they agreed to go through counseling. A few weeks later he wrote to tell me he had moved back in with his wife to be closer with his daughter, but he was not going to resume the marriage. They had found a way to manage their relatinship for the benefit of their daughter.
There are not very many men who would go to this length to protect their children from a life-long pursuit of a phantom method of filling the void they experience when loosing the attention of their parents. I do believe they would want to if they knew the repercussions, but it rarely known they might have such an impact on their children.
It isn’t limited to men either. I met a woman in 1985 who took her four children to her ex-husband’s house and dropped them off saying “I’ve done my share, now it’s your turn!” She would only take one of the children at a time. She simply didn’t have the ability to cope as a single mother.