Freudian Psychology has a theory that children who have a close relationship with their parents tend to look for those properties in a mate. It happens that the first example of the male gender that a baby girl encounters is her father, and that forms her impression of maleness in general, up to and including the mate she connects with and, if she's anywhere near the Christian religion, her impression of God as "our Father in Heaven." If she has a negative father, she'll often grab up negative boyfriends as well, so it takes a certain amount of awareness to be able to break out of that tendency.