That great director of the eighties' coming-of-age movie, John Hughes, died recently. This was not good news. This is the man who gave us Ferris doing 'Twist and Shout' on a float. This is the man who turned the weekend detention into a really hot date. This is the man who said girls could wear boys' clothes, bang drums, and still be sexy. I was forced to throw myself into a three-day period of wearing black, wailing, beating my chest, and burning things in his honour. It was like saying goodbye to my youth.

But John Hughes is reaching out from beyond to define my grown-up-hood, too. I have been thinking about Kevin Bacon in small, white y-fronts. Specifically, in She's Having a Baby. There's a memorable scene in this movie, where our protagonist is preparing the marital bed for some robust love-making with his wife. She is desperate to have a baby. He is clutching at the last vestiges of his youth. She stands in the bathroom contemplating her contraceptive pill. He watches her, and says, 'Sex now, babies later.'

Sex now, babies later. It is a measure of the very great distance it is possible to come in a new relationship (that's about four weeks to you and me), that I am already negotiating the 'sex now, babies later' conversation. I know what you're thinking. You can't leave me [home] alone for five minutes without my getting into some kind of sex-related scrape or other. Well, I knew this whole pony riding business was going to be a bit Yeehah!, but things have gone seriously Way Out West.

The difference is, in my world, I am not wearing little white y-fronts. There's no marital bed, either. There is no ensuite bathroom with matching hand and bath towels in which to have such grown-up conversation. When you have those things, it makes sense you might start thinking about babies. That is the law of the relationship universe. There's a certain chronology at work that makes practical sense, and, frankly, I can see the attraction. If you have co-ordinated bathroom accessories, he'll never leave you, even when you are wielding a screaming baby, a full nappy, and a handful of Wet Wipes at him.

Except I've never been very practical. Because my chronology is working out a bit differently.

The falling in love part: yes, okay, I'll come out as having fallen in love. It's wonderful, I recommend it, except for the whole being vulnerable stuff, which routinely gets in my way, like I have my own little personal demon standing behind me, all bright red and horny, stabbing me in the ass with his pitchfork, needling me in a whiney voice to be a bitch and f**k things up, so I can return, safe and unharmed, to singleland, where I belong. I am also having lots of falling in love sex.

And it's amazing. It starts even before I lay eyes on him. Anticipating the sight of him, those five or ten minutes before he's actually within range, I'm thinking about liberating him from his clothes and where I'm going to have him first. I hope that he'll turn down the offer of a cup of tea [hey, social protocol has its place], or not want to go out, or do anything other than comply with my demands for satisfaction.

I want to be breathless and sweaty and have my fingernails pressed into his flesh and clutch his hair in my fingers and have my lips mashed and bitten and caressed until they are full and pink and have my calves wrapped around his thighs as soon and as deeply as humanly possible. I want him to scoop me up in his arms and haul me around the bed. I want him to scratch me hard from the shoulders to my ass. I want to close my eyes, and press my nose to his skin, and talk in whispers. I want to eat him. I want it all. Everything. And, thankfully, pretty often that's what I get. And if I don't, I love waiting until I am going to get it next.

The thing is about the phenomenal, lovely sex? We're doing it without the assistance of a small, white pill. We're doing it without condoms. We're doing it without withdrawal. We've talked about the wisdom of using those things. How not using them is insane. But somehow, they never quite make an appearance. And it looks like we've decided to just see what happens.

I can't tell you, it scares the pants off me (if I was wearing any, and let's face it, I'm not quite a bit of the time). Because it might really happen, and until recently I was not even sure whether we were having a relationship (I'm now reassured that we are, because he told me, but also because he has firmly planted his toothbrush next to mine and Cowgirl's in the bathroom). We haven't even met each other's people. My best friends are still wondering whether he's actually a figment of my imagination. But they can wait a bit longer. Because mostly I am thrilled, excited, moved to tears.

In the end, nothing much makes sense with this thing. Maybe because I'm 40 and, when it comes to such things as love, and sex, and babies, you have to let go of things working out neatly, the dream you had when you were little, like a balloon, into the sky. And it may not be ideal, but I quite like the fact it's turning out this way.