‘Please don’t put that in your blog, for f*&k sake Mum!’

But I am and she doesn’t know. ‘Cause it is some sort of watershed moment when you can discuss sex with your 23 year old daughter. And not just sex, but the ins and outs (oh, yes, easy pun) of sleeping with someone who satisfies all your criteria. Of having one night stands that are glorious but just that and the disappointment of sleeping with someone you like, to find out they just don’t meet all your needs.

You see, my beautiful daughter has been in committed relationships since she was at high school. She has always had admirers and apart from the teenage boy trysts, has had two ‘long term’ relationships. But she is single of late, and discovering herself!

“OMG Mum, it was so awful! So disappointing! His you know what was skinny and small and well, there was nothing in it for me…’ SO disappointing. He even tried again the next morning and it was just as bad”

This was NOT the conversation I’d ever thought I have with my daughter, ever. But I’m so happy we did. I tried to make the usual excuses for her ‘Mr Media’ – he was shy, he was nervous, he was intimidated, it was your first time together… ‘nope, I get all that, but he just doesn’t do it for me!’ ‘What am I going to say to him? I don’t want to hurt him, but I’m not going to fake it’.

So here I am, at 50, suggesting ways for my daughter to let her lover know that he’s a dud in bed. Really? This was never in the parenting manuals. If I hadn’t divorced her father some 15 years ago, I wonder if I’d ever have had that conversation? But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!

‘Darling you just have to realise that not everyone is compatible. I went a bit crazy when I left your dad. I slept with several men that first year – It was glorious ,but awful at the same time. I should have done what you are doing in my twenties, but I married your father instead. God it was fun though! I never thought I’d be telling you this, don’t tell your sister! I use to bring them home when you kids were with your dad on weekends. I think everyone has to do it as some point.’ I had a ‘free’ sexual life for about 4 years, but not many people know – I didn’t even tell my now husband – he is such a loyal person he wouldn’t understand. It took seven weeks of dating before he and I slept together – but thank God, (we have great sex!).

‘Enough, oh my God Mum, stop! I don’t tell my friends!’ she says. And I agree, ‘not everyone would understand and you would get labelled’. But I understand, and my best friend, she understood. We looked out for each other. I don’t regret it for a second. There was perhaps one or two where I wondered why I’d bothered. But after a while you do calm down and the novelty wears off. I just had 20 years of monogamy to overcome and experience some life!

I still couldn’t believe that we were having this conversation, quite naturally and without any shyness. It was great and fun! It had taken us some years to get to this point!

‘The guy I took home last weekend, now he was just perfect, but I don’t know much about him. I met him at a club, but we’d talked on Tinder before.’ Now it was my time to be scared and intrigued in the same second. Right, so she was going to tell me more! I love this new version of my girl, this unconstricted, free spirit. I didn’t think she had this adventurous gene, but here is it!

Her first ‘real’ boyfriend was a lovely country boy – dreadlocks, ambitious, artistic – in him I thought she had found her first and only love. I loved him. Her siblings loved him! My parents loved him. He was funny, and good looking, and naughty and nice. He had a big mixed up family like us and they had involvement in horse racing, my Dad’s idea of heaven. I was a bit sad that she would not get to experience life, but how lucky she was to find ‘the one’ at Uni and grow up with him. They passed the one year mark and seemed content with each other.

And then he dumped her! It was her first heartbreak and we all mourned her loss. She was so upset and angry as he’d had sex with her and then decided to have ‘that’ conversation. As she said ‘I’d even stocked the fridge with all his favourite food God damn it!’- she was housesitting and looking forward, I think, to playing mummy and daddy with her hunky boyfriend. He’d got cold feet when she’d invited friends for a BBQ and it was all too domestic for him. He had a conversation with her that night when drunk, and couldn’t take it back the next day, so they were done after 18 months.

Next came the Dweeb – I’m not going to name him, cause I plan to be a bit nasty. He was fundamentally a nice guy, but skinny and a ‘try hard’ hipster. (But now, I gather, perhaps not that skinny where it mattered?).  He was an only child of a mixed up coupling and relied on my beautiful girl to teach him how to behave in a large robust family. We ribbed him a bit, but he did take it well and soon learnt to work with our humour. They were inseparable. When our Christmas crisis unfolded last year, he and she came by and made us all breakfast, silently, but together – he offered strength with cuddles from his puny body and even then I pondered what she saw in him. But she saw something. She loved him. They lived together, they worked together, they shared common interests. They continued to grow together. I saw her blossoming. She finished her degree, got a great job, learnt how to drive, bought a car and began her ‘grown up’ life with him.

She decided earlier that year she wanted to travel a bit. I was delighted. I secretly hoped that her horizons would expand and knew that he would never be able to keep up with her. But I kept this to myself. She took off and for two months travelled Europe. Independent. Free. Confident. Yes! They met up for a couple of weeks somewhere, but only as she was about to come home, and he was to continue his journey of discovery for a few months more before returning to her.

Before she left, they had discussed the ‘what if you meet someone’ scenario – rather she did with him, and he was horrified. But she gave him free a free leash and they set their boundaries. He was adamant that he would not be keen to meet anyone else and she likewise gave him that promise – and stuck to it.

He, of course, did not. After three years of being with her, he slept with someone else and she found out an hour later. Social media can be a curse sometimes! She was again angry and devastated that she had in fact ‘kept herself to herself’ despite plenty of opportunities for discovery while in Europe. He couldn’t keep it together for a more than a week. She was angry that he had made her feel so bad for giving him a get out of jail card, and yet, that’s exactly what he should have taken.

Weeks of midnight conversations across the world ensued. He would ring when drunk. She would hang up. He would send her flowers from somewhere, and she would dump them in the bin immediately. She was angrier than I had ever seen. He reasoned with her from afar. She gave him a timeline to apologise and make good – but he didn’t come through. So she told him she was done.

After a few weeks she told me she was on Tinder. I was so impressed! She’s always been a little shy and reserved, private and not discussed her sex life with me that much. But my girl had found a new confidence. She got so many matches, she was aghast. And so was I – where had this app been when I was single some 10 years ago? She started dating ‘random’ men. And the Dweeb found out. One of his friends alerted him.

He rang her, furious! She told him he’d had his chance. He asked her if it was just for revenge. She told him it was none of his business. She discovered that she was indeed a very attractive young woman, and so many other men were there to tell her. She revelled in the attention. She was out three or four nights a week and loving it!

The Dweeb came home. He begged to see her. She met him for dinner and when he failed to apologise or discuss their break up, she again told him she was done. He left notes on her car. Eventually she told him flat out all the things that disappointed her about him and what she was learning in her new world. She was well and truly done.

So now she is ‘out there’. She is careful, takes precautions and only meets people she has spoken with for a while. She always lets her younger brother know when she is meeting her dates and he invariably picks her up afterwards. That in itself is astounding to me. She lives with her father (my ex-husband) and while she doesn’t confide in him, she openly lets her brother, sister and I know what she is up to. She has turned full circle. She may not use the bathroom or shower in front of us, but she has certainly lost some of her inhibitions and I can’t wait to hear more!