Can I ask about inter-class relationships?

[edinbed]

I am from a deprived, working class background although I "got out" and went to univesity(undergrad and MFA). My last long term relationship was with someone from a similer back ground to me who had also went to uni, had a professional job.

New boyfriend is very middle class, family university educated for generations. He's lovely but our relationship started early this year then progressed under lockdown. Sometimes I feel self conscious about my accent (strong glaswegian) and some cultural stuff. He doesn't seem to mind but I've not really met many of his friends or anything yet due to the national and local lockdowns or his parents who live quite far away although I have met them and his sister on zoom.

I am self employed in a creative field and he is a professional.

Does anyone else have any experiance of inter-class relationships?

My DP grew up in a family where she was the first one to go to university. Her dad was injured when she was very little and lost his job, and for most of her childhood neither of her parents worked and they were on benefits and had a council house. She grew up sharing her room with her two sisters and her parents and two of her siblings still live there.

I grew up very middle class - my parents met doing postgrad degrees at Oxford and my dad always had a well paid job; it was expected I'd go to university and so would my siblings. Although we grew up in the Midlands, my accent is posh because it's how my parents speak.

When DP and I got together we had to agree to meet both sets of parents all in one trip, in one day - otherwise we were each terrified the other would back out!

I don't know if this is just us, but I know DP's family always expect family to be much closer geographically than mine do - my DP's family would expect everyone to be nearby, so you'd naturally meet family very soon. OTOH my family are quite spread about the place. My older brother's first baby was born while he and his wife were in Brazil - my MIL cannot believe that my parents coped with that, and she has never forgiven me for the fact DP doesn't live within a ten minute radius of her house. So I wonder if that has to do with his family not having met you?

I hope he isn't making you feel conscious about your accent or other things, though. If he is, he's not worth being with. DP teases me about how I speak (on our first date I was really nervous and so sounded super posh because I was going all formal). And I notice that she drops into a more pronounced version of her accent when she's with family or when she's channelling her mother!

I grew up not poor but not well off. Had a baby young. Met my boarding school educated husband 10 years later. He doesn’t seem to feel the divide but I do if I’m honest.

Sorry, he’s Ali university educated the boarding school comment was more to show the difference in our upbringing.

*also

Christ. I might just go lie down

@SarahAndQuack, Thanks for that reply, a lot of it rang true! Yes his family are pretty international and my family apart from me are still all on the same housing scheme on the outskirts of Glasgow. When I lived with my previous partner he would only buy a house locally to his parents which did seem normal to me!

DP has not seen his family either since lockdown so its not like he is ashamed of me but I suppose I worry what they will think of me. He does tease me for my accent which like your partner varies a bit in strength depending on who I am spending time with but not in a mean way! I guess other things like he took me to a really nice place for dinner and I started tidying up plates after and passing things to the waitress which isn't the done thing but until then I thought pizza express was posh! He laughed about it but at the time I think he was mortified.

Still its good to know it can work, do you ever feel annoyed or irritated at your partner for not knowing how to act?

I notice differences in friendships and relationships, just in terms of how they have no conception of a life without money. They just don't get it or what it is like (and I am talking middle class lefties) or the differences in life experiences and attitudes. Really don't get it.

Having said that, most arsey (brief) boyfriend I had prided himself on a more working class background than me and used to mock me for being middle class and call me Lady Stonesandbark. When I pointed out he went to biodanza classes which was certainly not middle class, he replied ' isn't it?' which just showed how far he had assimilated into the middle classes whether he liked it or not.

@SameToo Thats interesting, why do you think you feel the divide more? I think I might because when it boils down to it, I'm the inferior one!

I'm the inferior one!

No you are not! Why do you think that?

I have colleagues who live in the valleys in Wales and love it - born and bred there and the describe the sense of community and looking out for each other - I am really envious. For my job I recently interviewed someone who lived in the fifth most deprived part of the Uk and talked of a survey in which 95% of residents said they loved living there. Again, it was the community. I know not all deprived areas have this (wasn't like that where I lived), and have many other problems, but I do envy that close knit ness. I now live in a naice middle class area and hate it. Have no idea what the people more than one door away from me even look like. My valleys colleagues are genuinely shocked by that.

I am fairly middle class; parents both uni educated and professionals, grew up in south west London, I went to grammar school and my younger brother to private school, nice house which they owned etc. My DP's parents work in Manila jobs, were separated and him and his mum lived in various rented/council properties. He left school at 16 and went to a vocational college. I don't think it is really an issue in our relationship. We both get on really well with each other's families (although his dad does sometimes call me posh ) and our general outlook on life and ambitions are largely aligned.

*manual jobs!! No idea what a Manila job is...

Well, I'd pass plates to a waitress as I think it's basic politeness. So maybe he's posher than me.

I don't think I've ever thought DP didn't know how to act. The thing I do notice is how families talk about money/careers.

With money, DP's family will say things like 'ooh, that's a nice house near you, you could buy it for me!' or 'oh, you're feeling flush, I could do with some of that!'. DP knows my parents have more money than hers, so at first if they'd ask her what she wanted for a birthday present, she'd say something like 'oh, a couple of grand would be lovely!' My parents were expecting her to suggest something like a book she wanted to read or the kind of chocolates she likes. She didn't exactly expect them to give her 2k, but she also found it quite weird that they'd be quite casually discussing loaning my brother the deposit for a house. I did find it really grabby initially, but it's how her parents act too - they don't expect someone to give them money but their philosophy is that you don't get if you don't ask. So there was that.

The other thing I think was a problem was jobs. DP's family never have any interest in what she's doing - they think it's rude to talk about work too much. I'd always be asking, thinking I was showing a polite interest, and they'd stonewall. Or I'd mention how work was going for me and they'd think I was being rude talking about it. So that was a communication issue. But I don't think DP is wrong - I just think it's just a difference.

There are definitely things where DP thinks I don't know how to act, too. We try to meet in the middle or talk about it.

Cross posts. You're not the inferior one! If he makes you feel like that, he's a dick.

You’re not inferior!

I think I struggle with the money difference. What he would spend on a pair of pyjamas i wouldn’t spend on a years worth of clothes. Or his parents giving me expensive gifts / paying for things. I’m just not used to the money. I was a single mum on minimum wage for a long time so it’s quite a turn.

Oh, I just thought of something else I think is funny about differences and similarities.

DP's mum is fanatical about education for DD. She is always on at us to educate her, teach her things, get her to the top of the class (DD is all of three). She will tell anyone who will listen how hard she worked to educate all of her children (and she really did).

My parents are the same, though they dress it up with a thin veneer of pretending they believe rote learning is the devil and bright children will just naturally love learning. They also want desperately to know how clever DD is, how she compares to her peers, etc. etc. (Did I mention, DD is three?).

DP and I have completely different experiences of home life, education, you name it. But we are having the exact same experience of pushy grandparents trying to tell us how to educate our child! And we both agree we want to leave the poor child to herself until she's at least, you know, five or so ...!

@stonesandbark lol, I was being a bit tongue in cheek about me being inferior! Yes the community aspect of the scheme was nice, it was great as a kid and for mum's with young kids.

@StrawberryPi That is really good to know that it hasn't been an issue in your relationship. There are some issues like he went to private school and would he want his children to go private as well, but its way too early to talk about that sort of thing!

@SarahAndQuack It was a really fancy place we were in so it might have been that. He's middle class but not aristocracy!

Interesting about the money thing, I think my family say stuff like that all the time to each other like I'll say to my dad what he wants for christmas and he'll say a ferrari or a million pounds. Its not that he thiks he's going to get it or expects it its just that its so wild a thing to say because its so unrealistic, its like a joke, could it be the same with your dp's family? My mum used to always say about celebrities growing up how she would like a leaf out of their bank book or how I should get married to Ronnie O'Sullivan because he was rich. Its was just a bit if nonsence and not serious or grabby. However it could be different in different families.

My fiancé is working class, very poor background. I'm middle class.

His great grandparents were possibly upper middle class or upper class. They apparently had land and horses so he's heard. Certainly a relative has a huge Victorian portrait of an upper class ancestor and there was once a country estate. He has middle class relatives.

It's interesting how quickly people can fall up and down the social scale.

YY, it's exactly that - it's not like anyone's going to give you a million pounds, so everyone knows it's a joke.

Initially I found it grabby with my MIL because she'd say it knowing she could pass it off as a joke, but half-hoping I'd say yes, sure, here's some money.

The way DP explained it was: if you're coming into a family and someone says 'mum, can you lend me 50k for a deposit on a house? You can? Great!' then when someone else says 'what would you like for a birthday present,' you really don't know if 'oh, 2k would be lovely!' is a joke or an appropriate response. You think, wait a minute, is what we joke about what people actually say to each other?

Working class culture is not inferior to middle class culture!
Would you say Indian culture is inferior to British culture? No you wouldn’t. So bin that off.

DH and I are weird in that we’re both working class but both excruciatingly well educated and make shit loads of cash.

Our DC are upper middle class I guess in that they all went to public schools and have grown up in a very comfortable setting.
But their parents are not ‘posh’ so that sets them apart - they think it gives them an edge .

They’ve had partners from different classes and it hasn’t been a problem. Only one girlfriend had a bit of a chip about how much money we ‘wasted’ - she was achingly middle class but quite skint. And she was rather uptight for my son - terribly concerned about what people thought where fewer fucks we could not give. Reader - she didn’t last.

@Missus I was joking about the inferior thing!

Its not all me worrying about myself doing stuff wrong or being common. Early on in our relationship he made a comment wondering why "poor people feed their kids so much crap" I explained to him about lack of access to food, about processed food being cheaper and also that when I was a kid that is how we got treated. Our parents couldn't afford music lessons, activities or holidays so you made do with a bag of chips and a can of coke sitting down by the river in leiu of real experiances and treats. I think he just had no idea before then and thought it was some sort of neglect!

I am middle class and have a degree. Dh is working class. Didn't sit his O levels. He is one of hardest working people I know and the only one of his family to own a house.
His siblings make snide comments to him about "forgetting his roots" and "poshness", probably because he drinks wine and gin, not Sam Smiths. Oh and he eats " foreign food".

DH and I are both from pretty far down the working class (parents left school at 12 and had very deprived upbringings, poor literacy, low-paid manual jobs) but we both got out via education (despite significant parental opposition from mine on the grounds of ‘not for the likes of us’) and ended up at Oxford, which was the first time I’d really spent much time around established middle-class people and UC people.

I was a confident, comparatively articulate person, but I was quickly aware of the things they took for granted — very good schools with a big variety of subjects, parental encouragement, professional parents and their circle of friends (I’d never met a surgeon socially, or a journalist, or an academic, or an artist), somewhere quiet to study, cultural capital, just a far wider experience.

Casual references to parents taking them on European road trips to deliver computers to Eastern bloc academics, to owning a boat, to second homes, foreign exchanges, being a chorister, being able to read orchestral scores. I’d never been to a restaurant at eighteen (my parents to this day are uneasy in them, and my dad leaps up with his wallet to pay at the counter as soon as he’s finished his main course no matter how often he’s told they’ll bring a bill, or I’m paying!) and had only got a passport at eighteen to go au pairing, which my parents thought was crazy and risky.

I have a very strong memory of someone at Oxford making a joke about something ‘ending with a dead soprano in a sack’ and as I’d never even heard of Rigoletto and knew nothing about opera, I had a vast sense of my own restricted horizons. Ironically a music student friend got me rehearsal tickets and I now adore opera.

I used to wonder how my new friends even knew some jobs existed, or were something you could aim to do! Like an opera director, or a forensic archaeologist or a museum curator!

I’m middle class, privately educated, to masters level education... though we didn’t have tonnes of money there were always holidays and things we wanted as well as needed.

DH is working class background but went to a good school & his parents were somewhat old-fashioned so although they weren’t educated well they did well enough to be in work & improve their living by the time he came along (late 3rd baby) - he went to a good school & eventually got to uni & says he always went out with middle class girls so educated himself that way as to what kind of lifestyle he liked! Now a teacher.

The main issues I find are around words and pronunciation - he drops his t’s and h’s at times, and says f/v instead of th which I never noticed... but now our kids do it, it drives me mad! It’s then awkward to pick my kids up on things he does. And he says toilet / serviette and I say napkin / loo which leads to lots of banter.
I also find him more overtly snobby and will talk about money lots when I was brought up never to talk about money!

But we have way more in common than differences and never make each other feel bad about the other’s background.

It's interesting how quickly people can fall up and down the social scale

Yes that’s very true. However if some talks ‘posh’ no one will believe they haven’t got any money.
It only takes one compulsive gambler to wipe out a substantial fortune.
We know someone who went to a top public school and Oxford and inherited a decent business from his father and he ran through the lot. Just before lockdown he was evicted from a bed sitter for several months non payment of rent. The landlord thought because he spoke proper and had a smart suit there must be money somewhere.
He was lent a room by a friend until the friend’s son came back from overseas - goodness knows what will happen to him.

I grew up solidly middle class (private school, nanny, skiing, piano lessons etc). DH was working class and at points living in actual poverty.

I would say that although we both have very similar drive and ambition, it's the smaller things that set us apart.

He's incredibly risk averse, particularly when it comes to money. I try and make ours 'work for us' but he hates debt (even mortgage debt) and would rather the money was 'safe'.

And in direct contradiction to this: also isn't frugal AT ALL because he now earns well and doesn't have to be. I'll use the internet to find the cheapest price for something, then get cashback on it, then use the cashback to buy vouchers which are topped up with an extra percentage to spend to buy something else I need. He walks into a shop and just buys stuff, no consideration made for price.

His family are all local and very close. They socialise together and it's not a birthday/Christmas etc without having seen everyone. My closest relative lives 100 miles away and a significant proportion are in other countries.

He had serious class based wobbles about getting a cleaner 😁

These are things I've had to sit down and think about though. It isn't an inferiority/superiority thing - it's just our backgrounds are different. It's much more important for us in a long term relationship that we have similar aims and aspirations - in terms of life ambitions, how we want our children to grow up, the value we place on education, offering them experiences (and having them ourselves), etc.