No wonder the sexes find it difficult to accommodate their respective needs and desires.Neither sex, however, are above a bit of cake and eatism. A ring round my female friends produced a fairly standard list of demands. What most of them seemed to want from a husband was general anti-lonely insurance (ditto men), plus a father for their children and a general sounding-board for their problems So far, so good. What about the details? What kind of personality were they looking for? “Strong” was a word which featured prominently. But how did they define it? “A strong man is one who is in touch with his feelings and not afraid to express them,” said Caroline, 32, a graphic designer, echoing the words of several others. But would she like to see her man cry? “Yuk, no,” came the reply.

“It’s such a turn- off.”The other contentious item on the wish-list was “security”. Having established that this did not mean a man in a Group Four uniform, it soon became apparent that “security” meant “money”. “I don’t expect to stay at home and let my husband provide for me,” said Diana, 29. “But I do expect him to be able to keep us going financially when the time comes to have children.”Men are also torn between two versions of womanhood. There’s the wife that stays at home with the kids and welcomes her harried husband back to the peace of the domestic hearth. The downside is that the family must subsist on one salary and the wife is often frustrated and bored.

Then there’s the wife who shoulders equal financial responsibility and goes out to work – but neither partner sees much of the children and both are tense and cross at the end of the day. “Conflicts like these will only be resolved,” says one female friend, “when husband and wife are able to work shorter or more flexible hours. That way a husband will be able to spend longed-for time with his children, and his wife won’t have to make some hideous choice between keeping her mind and leaving her kids, or devoting herself to her offspring and screwing her career.”These days, of course, most men and women espouse the notion of 50:50 sharing, both in terms of cash and household chores Not so in my mother’s day. She had so little to do with domestic money matters that when my father died, she was completely at sea. “One of the things I find most confusing is that everyone is supposed to know everything these days,” says Anna, 30, a teacher. And d:reaming about New Labour is exactly what the nation has been up to ever since The dreams are full of idealism and social hope.

They are also charged with the erotic, and women in particular are having them in spades. “I was running away from the evil army,” muses Kirsty, 31, “across a rocky hillside: it comes from Kidnapped, I’ve had the dream before. The first is “Know thyself”, the second is Socrates’ gem: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”. Dream, you may remember, were the pop group chosen by New Labour to play at their election-night shindig. So, what is the answer? I don’t know, but there are two dictums on which I am content to rest my baffled and weary brain. It becomes a typical teenager – stubborn, cussed, and more demanding than ever, but in a different way, by which time many fathers of such daughters are long-gone, often in new relationships, with another delicious, pink-cheeked bundle in another push-chair. But, as one friend said to me, “Any fool can look after a baby, it’s when they get older that the going gets rough.” A daughter is for life, not just for Christmas.The trouble is that the content of the push-chair does not remain docile and beguiling It grows up and gets cheeky It doesn’t believe everything you tell it.