Matt Damon has just found out the brutal truth about being a Girl Dad

It’s not often I say this, but poor old Matt Damon. At the age of 55, he’s still working, has avoided superhero capes, and his 20-year marriage appears to be strong, so he’s earned some respect. But he’s got teenage daughters and they will humble any man, however normally self-deprecating they are.

Standing on the red carpet at the premiere of his new film The Rip with his wife and three daughters, his 17-year-old, Gia, started openly mocking his pose, leaning forward puffing her chest out and saying, “Why are you standing like this?” And Damon? He just lapped it up, gazing at her adoringly and taking the hit. Because he’s a Girl Dad and girl dads don’t stand a chance.

I too am a girl dad, a proud father of two regularly embarrassed daughters Rosa, 24, and Tess, 22. Before they were born, I was a party boy who enjoyed all-nighters and crashing out at 6am. I was as self-centred as any manchild, obsessed with my toys and my mates and my hopeless dreams. And then Rosa arrived and within six months I had become an entirely different person. I became a girl dad.

You can find us all over Instagram and TikTok, from the big, hulking men watching football while their daughters glue pretty sparkling crystals all over their face, to the guy suddenly getting protective when his 8-year-old talks about a boy trying to kiss her to… well… me being secretly filmed by my daughter watching Pitch Perfect with tears streaming down my face.. (Side note, girl dads, is Pitch Perfect fair? How many times did we have to watch our daughters do that weird cup and handclap song? How many times have we teared up? It’s kryptonite, that movie.)

Because being a girl dad is an extreme strain on men’s normally very limited emotional resources. On the one hand we have to be more sensitive, caring and responsive to the rollercoaster of emotions that a teenage girl goes through. On the other hand, we suddenly become intensely protective because, let’s be honest, we know what we were like when we were their age. Girl dad icon Mel Horowitz, Cher’s dad in Clueless, phrased it perfectly when she was leaving the house with her bad boy date. “Son, anything happens to my daughter, I got a .45 and a shovel – I doubt you’ll be missed.”

We know that, as Reese Witherspoon told us on the Armchair Expert podcast, a girl dad’s behaviour writes on his daughter’s minds “with a sharpie, not a wipe and erase board”. Chris Rock was more succinct. “As a father, you have only one job: keep your daughter off the pole.”

As a father you hope to futureproof your daughter from wrong ’uns by modelling a right ’un. It’s a huge responsibility – if we want our daughters to surround themselves with supportive, loving men, that’s what we’ve got to be.

At one point, in their late teens, both were having difficulties with men who didn’t deserve them. I had a friend who used to be a West Ham hooligan and still knew a few faces. We joked about how easy it would be to put a team together, jump in a transit van, snatch these lads from the street and teach them a proper lesson for disrespecting my girls. I am a thoroughly respectable member of society, but there I was actually “jokily” dry running in my head a terrible act and genuinely thinking it was worth a shot. Girl dads aren’t always sane.

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What do we get in return? Mockery. I felt for Matt Damon. I took my girls indoor climbing recently and looked down from the bouldering wall after completing an impressively difficult route to find them helpless with laughter. “That’s how you are with everything,” Rosa said, miming a flapping fool flailing at the cliff face like a drunken crab. My crest was truly fallen.

I phoned them while writing this and asked what they would do if I won the Nobel Peace Prize. Let me stress that award for a second – the Nobel Peace Prize. “I feel like your speech would be cringe and we’d be like, oh my god,” said Tess. “And when you came to thanking us, you’d probably cry. Embarrassing.”

Would there be any affection under that? Pride maybe? I asked. “Oh, you’re so cute,” she said, and swiftly changed the subject.

Would I have it any other way? Of course not. Neil Armstrong had two sons and a daughter. I’ll put hard currency down that when it came to conversations, the boys probably bragged at school about their dad flying the big rocket to the Moon while his daughter pointed out he’d messed up his speech when he landed, and he looked really stupid bouncing around in zero gravity.

And that is exactly how it should be.