Fathers of MEM are often, if they are still involved in any way with their children at all, seen as competition, rather than as a child in need of a father. Fathers withdraw emotionally and push their son to be the emotional stability to mother, however, when the son takes that place, fathers often feel pushed away.
A MEM often seems to not be able to do anything right in the father's opinion. Mother will always put her son first but father seems to always put son down.
Father fears the son as he is put in an equal place to him. Mother sees the son as partner, he gets to counsel over adult affairs. He is asked for his opinion on matters he is often not mature enough to understand. For father, who does not want to be emotionally close to the mother, it is a blow to his ego because he still wants control. Instead of sorting out what the true trouble is, the lack of relationship between father and mother, father takes his anger out on the son.
In my MEM experience, he couldn't do anything right for his father. His father constantly criticized him. My MEM, along with his siblings, feared their father growing up but they would never admit to it. They became tense and frightened when father entered the room. They obeyed immediately, knowing he had a bad temper. The father fits the description of a Narcissist. Interestingly, he too was a MEM. He loathed his father, found him mostly worthless. Not because he drank or was a druggy, but because he wasn't able to take care of mother properly. He didn't make enough money, never got a good job, didn't know how to fix things, etc. Only he, as the son could take care of mother. He never learned to be a true man himself. His life was catering to his own mother.
When he started having children, he had no idea how to be a father. He only knew he needed to be in control and a woman will never control him again. The marriage was doomed from the beginning and surely ended in many affairs and at the end divorce. But long before the divorce, my MEM was made the mother's partner. Father was free to have affairs and be gone all the time because mother was home with her beloved son who took care of all her emotional needs.
Whenever he saw his MEM son, he would criticize him. He made sure he found something to put his son down with. This continued and is still continuing, however, my MEM doesn't take the bait anymore. At least not as he usually did. I still shiver when I think about the father and son working on putting an apartment in the basement of the enmeshed mother. Anything my MEM did was wrong. His father accused him of messing things up on purpose, measuring wrong just to make him mad, rolling out the insulation wrong, not being able to do anything correctly. His brothers are so much better, they know what they are doing, whatever happened to you that you can't get anything done right, etc. It was painful to listen to. When I mentioned it to my MEM later, asking why he gets picked on and put down all the time, he wasn't sure he knew what I was talking about. This is how their relationship has always been. It didn't dawn on him that it was not healthy, nor a normal father-son relationship. Just totally normal for him.
For me it was the furthest from normal. I felt the pain of abandonment. A father who literally did not know his son and had no interest in getting to know him. He measured himself with him, always making sure he is better than his son. Always knowing more, always putting him in his place, always being better, smarter, more successful, and on and on. The son became the competition and needed to be held in his low self-esteem in order for father to feel ok about himself.
The other extreme is the one where the son simply doesn't exist. Father really doesn't communicate with the son at all. Makes a few remarks here and there but overall has no relationship or knowledge about what the son is doing. My friend, a spouse of a MEM, has her MEM in this category. All the MEMs dealings are with the mother. The father chimes in very seldom, usually a line or two to comment on something that happened but a complete lack of emotions. This MEM thinks the family is in perfect order because the parents are not divorced. His father is there. He doesn't realize that his father's body is there but emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually he has never been there. He does not interfere when mother puts unnatural demands on their son, when mother complaints to son, when mother counsel with son, and so forth. He doesn't come to rescue the son when mother smothers him with her needs. He doesn't come to the rescue when his son struggles with his wife because as a spouse of a MEM she is frustrated and has had enough. He is void of any emotions towards the son and the entire dysfunctional dynamic of their relationships.
Either way, being competition or ignored, it hurts the son and keeps him from becoming a man, lacking a man's example and support. Either way their future relationships will suffer as any spouse of a MEM can testify.