Dad’s sex life? Eurrrghh!
After my mother died, my father married my stepmother – he was in his late seventies, and she was only 40 – but now he’s died, she can’t step telling me in detail about their sex life. I feel so embarrassed hearing such intimate details about my father.
I don’t want to cut off contact with my 12-year-old stepbrother, but how can I get her to stop? Sophia, by email
A You could lie and tell her that he had an even more amazing sex life with your mother. (‘The things I could tell you!’) Or you could bang on about how theirs was the perfect marriage. They were more in love than Romeo and Juliet or Anthony and Cleopatra. It was so transcendent that you could almost feel it. Or you could just keep absolutely quiet, smiling to yourself in the knowledge that you have such devastating weapons available but are choosing not to use them. First of all, though, I’d simply be honest: ‘You know I feel really uncomfortable when you talk about your sex life with my father. I feel I’m being disloyal to him, even hearing about it. So perhaps we could keep off the topic in future.’ She’s almost certainly doing this because she’s still jealous of the relationship you had with him, one that she knows, deep down, she would never have been able to live up to.
