<![CDATA[Confessional podcasts increasingly position personal disclosure as a lens through which digital audiences interpret social issues, including the fatherless phenomenon. This study examines how audiences negotiate meaning in a viral Indonesian podcast episode linking father absence to a woman's standards in choosing a romantic partner, using Stuart Hall's Encoding-Decoding framework. Through qualitative reception analysis, in-depth interviews were conducted with five women informants in Surabaya with varied family backgrounds and marital histories. Contrary to psychological accounts that treat the fatherless condition as a relatively consistent predictor of compensatory partner-seeking, decoding positions were plural: one dominant reading with negotiated elements, three positions along the negotiated spectrum, and one fully oppositional reading. Notably, the informant most directly affected by physical father loss did not produce the most uncritical reading, while the informant whose father was present but whose own marriage had failed produced the most oppositional one. Reception position is thus shaped less by the fatherless condition itself than by the cumulative complexity of lived relational experience and critical media literacy, offering a communication-based account of how audiences actively negotiate, rather than passively absorb, media narratives about family and relationships.]]>
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