Puppy love is what they called it in our teens when we felt desperately in love with a boy we hardly knew and had mad passionate make-out sessions one minute and end of the world rows the next.

But when we grow up we’re supposed to become balanced and sensible and choose a nice man to settle down with and that’s that.

Is it heck, says Sara Pascoe, who wants to shake up the bedrock of monogamy in her new stand-up show.

“It was inspired when I fell in love a year ago and started a new relationship,“ says the 33-year-old on her tour Sara Pascoe v History coming to Hemel Hempstead this month.

“For me it was the first time since I was a teenager that it was wholly consuming.

“I was on a five-hour car drive with a fellow comedian who I didn’t know very well and we just had this incredibly stimulating conversation. When I got out of the car I was madly in love with him. I just got swept off my feet in a way I hadn’t been expecting.“

She continues: “It made me consider how when you go into a relationship now, once you are out of your teenage years, you always have a back story, you have exes and things that have gone wrong for whatever reason.

“And then I started thinking about how we are influenced by our parents’ relationship and started researching the evolutionary history of pair bonding and our animal instincts.

“So I have combined all those three things to create a funny show and it’s really about what hope do any of us have really of staying monogamous for any length of time?

“It’s not cynical, though. I guess what it is saying is that we should forgive ourselves for how hard it is.“

Born to a musician father, Derek Pascoe of Flintlock fame, and a teenage mother, Sara had a fairly free upbringing in Dagenham and says grown ups told her she could do anything, even fly to the moon.

But when her family moved to Romford in the ’90s, Sara and her two sisters started at a local comprehensive, and life changed dramatically.

“I found that a lot harder. It was a real slap.

“I guess they thought I was weird because I was very outspoken. I liked to run assemblies, give lectures, set up a bully-line and basically made myself a real target by never shutting up or conforming.

“So I look back now and think adolescence was about learning to keep my mouth shut, rather than walking around telling everyone what to do, and now, of course, that’s virtually my job.“

It all turned around for Sara thanks to her mum Gail Newmarch, who without realising, set her daughter on the path to fame after the teenager had a party to try and get her classmates to like her, but the house got trashed.

“My mum really wanted to punish me, but she worked full-time and wasn’t at home until 7pm, so she made me join a drama group, Theatre Box in Romford, to keep me off the streets and away from people and it was just the best thing that could have happened to me because I suddenly had friends outside of school and I realised all I wanted to do was act.“

After a degree in English at Sussex University, Sara took any acting job she could get in between temping, but it wasn’t until she was 27 that she tried her hand at comedy.

“I had always been very sneering of comedy as I thought it was easy as it’s so flippant and silly. I didn’t realise it was all written down, I thought comedy was all improvised. I had seen Billy Connolly, Jack Dee and Harry Hill and thought they were making it all up and were geniuses.

“Then I realised it was all written down and I found that much less intimidating, so I thought I would book a gig. I did my first show – I loved the feeling of it.

“I think the thing with fear, be it jumping out of a plane or doing stand up, is your body gives you lots of endorphins flooding through you and it becomes a very physical addiction. The minute you finish a gig you want to do another one.“

After just five months she was spotted by talent agent Dawn Sedgewick who she says changed her life.

“For the first time I had someone really believing in me and saying ’no matter how long it takes it’s going to happen’.“

Since then Sara has gone on to appear on our small screens in Live at the Apollo, QI, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Mock The Week, Stand Up For the Week, and has been to Edinburgh five times.

And this year she has been travelling the country for her first 26-date headline tour, which sees her talk about female sexuality, Miley Cyrus and her own relationship with fellow comedian John Robins, who she lives with in Lewisham.

Although she jokes that she is “begging him“ to marry her, she says creating the show helped her have an epiphany about long-term relationships.

“If you think that monogamy is a natural state that everyone else is managing except you then you think you are a failure. But when you realise that it’s a cultural construct and everyone fails then you go ’oh I see, it’s supposed to be hard work and everyone fails’ and then it’s fine.“