"I met my partner's parents for the first time and it was an absolute disaster."

Forget puberty, there’s a rite of passage they don’t tell you about – meeting the parents.

It just never goes to plan.

No matter how much you prepare, no matter how carefully you iron your shirt or practise drinking wine while sticking out your pinky, you will mess it up and embarrass yourself forever more. It’s basically an unwritten law.

The (only) positive of this - aside from the good material it gives you for wedding/divorce speeches - is that everyone is in the same boat.

A quick whip around the office proved no-one is short of horrifyingly awkward meet the parent stories.

"I accidentally wore a see through top," said one.

"I choked on the steak at dinner," said another.

"The first time I met them? It was at his grandmother's funeral," shared someone else. (Post continues after gallery.)

Of course, sometimes it's not you that makes it awkward.

"I was introduced as her 'new friend'. She hadn't come out to her family yet," said one staff member.

"The first time I met my then-boyfriend's mother, she didn't address me directly, or speak English in front of me. She told her son (my boyfriend) in Spanish that I had good birthing hips, and asked if I was pregnant yet," wrote one user in a recent Reddit thread.

"She said she wanted a white grandchild. If only her son had told her that I spoke enough Spanish to understand her. Wow."

And don't even get us started on what happens when the first meeting isn't exactly, ahem, planned.

"We were caught at three in the morning having sex in his garden," wrote one brave Reddit user.

"During, his parents triggered the outdoor floodlight, we got up and brushed ourselves off and they were basically like 'what the hell'."

Don't you feel better about your own experience now?

Listen: Dating apps are impacting our ability to date - and not in a good way.