What my 23-year-old daughter and her boyfriend moving in has done to my marriage… and my sex life

When both our children had left for university, the silence was at first a little bewildering. My husband and I found ourselves feeling nonplussed and talking a lot to the dogs.

Slowly, though, we began to remember the joys of actual conversation, of listening to our music, of walking around the house naked. Then there was the pure pleasure of a long uninterrupted lie-in and the delight of doing exactly what we wanted with our weekends.

My husband, Anthony, and I had two glorious years before our eldest, 23-year-old Adelaide, asked to move back home – with Alex, her university boyfriend in tow. The fact she now came as a pair meant the dynamic was very different to before she went away.

When they moved into our London terraced home last September, we became an inter-generational household, rather than two parents and their adult child. We solemnly set up a WhatsApp group to discuss house matters as equals, and tried not to slip into bossy parental habits.

And it seems we are far from alone in having to negotiate this new set-up. Thanks to the ongoing cost-of-living ­crisis, soaring rents and untenable mortgage rates, a record 50 per cent of 23-year-olds in the UK live with their parents. There are dozens of hilarious online articles and posts in which twenty-somethings wail about the hideousness of trying to have sex without being ‘caught’ or overheard by parents, and their general annoyance at having to explain their whereabouts to said parents as if they were still children.

But God forbid anyone ever ponder what it’s like for the poor put-upon parents – not least what it does to our sex life (yes, we do still have sex in our 50s. Cue vomit emojis from offspring the world over).

In fact, it seems to me we’re the ones who are really having to trim our sails in the bedroom.

These days sex is a covert operation. We sneak around, careful to do everything behind closed doors; we keep the volume down and avoid the creaky parts (of furniture). We also grab opportunities in the afternoon (we both work from home, while the young ones go to an office), parking the dogs at the front door to alert us of any incomers.

I find myself wistful for those missed opportunities during the two golden empty nest years: all those evenings when we could have sloped upstairs for an early night, but instead sat rapt in front of Traitors. And we never did christen the new kitchen island . . .

It was over a year ago that Adelaide called, just before her finals, at a time when I would have promised her the moon if it lowered her exam anxiety levels, and asked if she could move back home.

Susannah Jowitt says her daughter moving in with her boyfriend helped her marriage

Of course, I said, that’s what home means – stupidly forgetting that she was joined at the hip with her boyfriend of a year.

‘And can Alex move in, too?’ she wheedled. ‘Because you see, he can’t afford proper rent because he’s giving music a go.’

I was too happy at the thought of seeing her to refuse them. And at least it wasn’t my child set on ‘giving music a go’, words guaranteed to strike dread into any parent.

We laid the ground rules at an initial ‘house meeting’ (my description, that made both daughter and husband roll their eyes). My husband would not bark at his daughter to clear up after herself in the kitchen; instead she would cook for all of us and he clean up. This made everyone happy. I would not growl when they slung their coats and shoes off wherever they first stopped in the house; they would learn to hang stuff up.

New rules have cropped up along the way. Anthony and I have grown used to creeping around in the evenings, because while we’ve fallen into the habit of staying up until midnight, the snowflakes must go to bed early in readiness for work the next day.

There was a spectacular row when we woke up one morning to find that, despite Adelaide being away for a girls’ weekend, all the bedrooms and sofa beds were unexpectedly full of crashed-out bodies in a sort of zombie apocalypse. They turned out to be Alex’s friends whom he’d brought home after a rowdy gig. I received a bunch of flowers after that one.

Now they ask in advance if they can have gangs of friends round, and I’ve noticed they take pride in making the house spotless for us to walk back into.

More troublesome is the matter of peacekeeping between couples. If they fight – which they do – do we weigh in on a side? We try not to give Alex a supportive wink when I hear Adelaide bossing him around in a way she’s always hated me doing to her.

Sometimes, there are noisy tears from her, which initially frightened her father and me: were we going to have to intervene in an abusive relationship? But five minutes later they were giggling and laughing, with Adelaide rolling her eyes and admitting she’s just a crier.

When my husband and I fight – which we do – at first I loved the fact that my daughter started taking my side. But as she’s become used to the nuances of cohabitation for even old decrepit couples like us, I’ve noticed she’s not so quick to freak out, and lets us slug it out on our own.

But if Adelaide and I quarrel, both husband and boyfriend stand like rabbits in headlights, poised for flight. If either one of them intervened, we would bite their heads off and they know it. So, as when faced with bear or rhino, they just stay very, very still. Fortunately, these wild ­animal sightings are infrequent and soon over, leaving behind little trace.

I once shouted at Alex for being a lazy git, but he was remarkably good-natured about it, and even raised his game a little. Later, he admitted his mother would have been much crosser.

There’s no doubt our financial arrangements have their pitfalls. Stupidly, I always promised our children they would never have to pay rent in their own home, and when Adelaide asked if Alex could move in along with her, it seemed wrong to charge him rent and not her.

So we settled on them both paying the same amount in ‘household contributions’ – to food, wi-fi and hot water. (They were let off heating because we don’t heat our bedrooms, so there was no extra cost. ‘And we are contributing our body heat,’ joked our daughter.)

The trouble is, I was bounced into naming my price by my sly puss of a daughter, before they even moved in, in that very first telephone conversation. Never good at mental arithmetic, I thought of what we spent on these bills and divided it by four, coming up with £30 per week each.

I never imagined just how much food one boyfriend could eat, let alone a young couple who stay at home to save money. Not to mention the elaborate ingredients they insist on adding to our online shop each week. Kombucha, kimchi, kefir and other ‘kostly’ items; Generation Z are more in tune with their gut biome than the price of such foods. The bill has swelled from about £70 to beyond £180.

At the same time, if they ever pay for anything, like a takeaway or an interim supermarket shop, they say it’s ‘only fair’ for us to reimburse them immediately.

‘Because our rent covers our food,’ explains the boyfriend. I find myself reminding him pedantically, every time, that he doesn’t pay rent, he pays towards costs.

Now we are approaching the anniversary of their arrival, I’ve decided to recalibrate those costs. After all, Adelaide now has a full-time job as a data systems consultant and Alex is a music events promoter.

I have worked out that they need to pay £60 a week each, just to cover booze, food and water: double what they have been paying. I think they might get a shock.

When my daughter told me last week they’re saving for a flat deposit, I did feel guilty I was about to ask them for more money. It’s a catch-22: the more we charge them, the longer they will have to live with us.

Do we stick with the ‘out the door at 24’ end-point we raised at the first house meeting, or are we then ­condemning them to a mould-infested hovel out in darkest Staines?

Yes, for my generation, filthy digs were a rite of passage. But for youngsters, who often work from home and can’t afford to go out, their living environments are exponentially more important. How can we condemn them to urban death traps?

I guess the truth is, I like having them living here. We’ve always run a busy house, always been those parents who threw their doors open to the boozing and the partying (much to our friends’ amazement, most of whom think we are impossibly liberal and over-relaxed), and living with my daughter again has made me appreciate her as an adult and, dare I say it, as a friend.

We have watched whole series on telly together: we all like Clarkson’s Farm and compete heatedly on University Challenge. Adelaide and I have cosied up in front of Bridgerton; my husband has another man in the house to watch sport with him.

We have cooked together, all of us trying out new recipes; we have had robust political debates over hoary chestnuts like climate change and gender, and throughout the year we have teased each other unmercifully. We have partied together, old and young – like at our annual summer party, where I proudly watched Alex hand round bowls of sausages, munching on them as he did so and recommending them lustily to friends of ours, friends of the children and friends of his. We even cleaned up together ­harmoniously the next day, to our mutual astonishment.

Gallingly, Adelaide and Alex have, occasionally, made me realise that perhaps my husband and I were falling into a slightly snipey routine with each other; him needling me about my lack of organisation, me complaining about his pessimism.

Practising the same level of tolerance and conciliation with him as I have done almost automatically with them (and as, I must admit, they do with each other), has undoubtedly made him feel more valued.

Could it even be that living with my daughter has made me more grown-up?

And truth be told, sex hasn’t been such a disastrous matter after all. We’ve never been a family of prudes. There’s a long-running joke between our children – dating from a drunken dinner conversation about five years ago – that their parents only ever have sex on a Sunday morning, because a few times we had made the mistake of assuming that as teen­agers, they were dead to the world at that point, and oblivious to any sounds that may come from our top-floor bedroom . . .

As for the kids, back in 2021, when Adelaide and our son, Winston, were both at home and in the middle of their first serious relationships, they were, we suspected, competing to have the raciest sex life.

One evening, just as we were on our way to bed, we heard them baying and howling in their respective next-door rooms. My husband soon put a stop to it by bashing simultaneously on both adjacent doors with his fists.

‘Stop that!’ he said sternly. ‘You’re all just showing off!’

Cue total, horrified silence. ‘Ha!’ he said to me, and we scuttled upstairs, trying not to laugh out loud.

Thankfully, though, 2024-daughter is far more careful and considerate about making noise than 2021-daughter. And the fact that both children are in stable relationships and not bringing home noisy strangers definitely does help.

In fact, we’ve been impressed by our housemates’ decorum: Alex and Adelaide snuggle on the sofa when we watch telly, but not to such an extent that we have to turn up the volume to cover the sound of snogging.

They are also discreet about sneaking off to have sex. And if they swing from the chandeliers when we’re away, well, all power to them. For all they know, we might be doing the same when they’re out.

In fact, it’s turned out to be quite fun for my husband and me to become more inventive where intimacy is concerned. Our new approach is more adaptive, more opportunistic in our housemates’ absences (which, surprisingly, makes it happen more often overall). And, when they are in, it’s given a new edge by the need not to be discovered.

So, as much as it surprises me, it’s happy – inter-generational – housemates all round.

At least until next year, when ­Winston graduates and inevitably wants to squash back in here, with his girlfriend . . .