Tried this at r/relationships and was told it didn't fit. I (44/M) and a single father of one daughter (20/F) and people say we're too close and it makes me feel self conscious.

There's quite a bit of back story to this (literally our life stories) but let me try to give the relevant info in concise a way as I can.I'm a single father of one beautiful and amazing daughter (sure I'm biased, but this is also an objectively true fact). Unfortunately my daughter has not had the simplest life. We lost her mother when she was 8 years old. When my daughter, Kayla, was 3 my wife got pregnant with a second child, a boy. Unfortunately my wife had late term issues and we lost him at 33 weeks.My wife went into a deep depression, it put a huge strain on us, and we got divorced. We remained friends but things became more and more difficult. Eventually my wife committed suicide after moving several states away.So I've had to be a single father to a girl which isn't easy (I know there's plenty of me out there, and obviously countless single mothers... props to all). This has caused us to have an amazing and close relationship. It's also unique and challenging.Luckily I owned my own business from the time I was in my mid 20s and was able to sell it for a decent amount of money several years ago. It's a niche type business so I don't wanna go into to much detail. The point is I've been able to pay for Kayla to go to college a couple hours away and we've been able to travel the world and do lots of fun stuff because of my luck in business.This is where things start to get... different... in some people's opinions anyway. We've always joked that kayla is kind of my second wife. She did lots of the cooking, chores, etc around the house and had to be very adult even as a young teen. I always felt somewhat bad but she seemed to enjoy most of it... made her feel needed (which she was!)As a result I've allowed to be fairly adult, especially over the last couple years. I allow her to drink (supervised), when we go on vacation/travel she can do what she wants. She's had a health dating life and we had "the talk" when she was 13-14 and got her on birth control at the right time and I've allowed her to have free reign in terms of her dating life (I don't ask for detail, I've always just told her as long as she's being safe I don't care).A couple friends have along the way said how she and I are too close or that they think our relationship is weird. The first was a guy that's a buddy of mine that just said he thought it was weird how I "knew" about her sex life and let it "go on" under my roof. I figured he's just traditional and close minded and blew it off.A female friend i work with brought up how much we travel together. To be fair, Kayla and I went out of town 9 times together last year... we have a good time and love to do stuff. I will say we're often awkwardly approached as if we're old guy and sugar baby or old guy and trophy girlfriend or whatever but generally laugh it off. But once my female coworker said something I did become more self conscious about it.The reason I'm posting now is because of last week. We have almost no other family left (no one close anyway) so Kayla and I often leave town for holidays. We went to a resort in Florida and had more than usual approaches (including an old fat man congratulating me on being able to "hit that" at my age). He was put in his place.Where it got weird was the second last night we were there. We had both drank quite a bit and were more drunk than we usually get. An older couple was once again talking to us like we were a couple and we had to correct them. However this time Kayla added "although if he wasn't my dad I'd probably be dating him!" She laughed and they laughed and we kinda let it go.But it bugged me. I asked her back in the room what she meant and she said how I had a lot of attractive qualities she likes in a guy and how "with the amount of time we spend together we probably would be dating if you weren't my dad." And something along the lines of "the only reason we're not together is because you're my dad."The last part is what shocked me most and has me fucked up. We didn't talk about it much the next day and I'm not sure what to do. I feel like I fucked up somehow... like I messed up our boundaries. Ive tried to do everything right but fuck. I guess my main questions are how to handle this (i know we need to communicate but tactics on how not to blow this would be great). And is this a defcon5 holy shit things are fucked up issue or is it a mild, "talk it out and move on" issue. Thanks for any help!**tl;dr: I'm a single father of one amazing daughter and we're very close. Concerned bc recently people have been pointing out we're "too close." Please help! via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2fr9zIX