has actually friendships come from mumsnet?

[KirstyT79]

hello. i was thinking about this. has anyone posted for advice on here and actually made a good friend or soulmate?. we are all using made up names with no photo, for me i decided to have a johnny cash moment. i am a man actually, but i have always said if i had a daughter i would call her kirsty as i liked the name. so i chose it as a user name for MN. but who hs broke away from mn world and actually met up together in the real world? i am curous.

I made some fab friends on here on the Threadkillers posts a few years back now.
We walked, virtually, with each other through many life events, good and bad.
Wouldn't know any of their names on here anymore (although I do try and spot them through their posting style!) but we do still chat to each other through fb and some of us have met up in real life.

@Sparklingbrook. not really i mean, some people don't have a username at all that is anything like a real person's name as long as if you are one of the lucky ones to get a true friendship out of a thread where you maybe asked for advice you explain it to them. that's the point of mn i could be male i could be female, it helps people to speak freely because nobody knows who you actually are.

[quote KirstyT79]@Sparklingbrook. not really i mean, some people don't have a username at all that is anything like a real person's name as long as if you are one of the lucky ones to get a true friendship out of a thread where you maybe asked for advice you explain it to them. that's the point of mn i could be male i could be female, it helps people to speak freely because nobody knows who you actually are.[/quote]
People will assume you were female from your username as it's a girl's name (they won't know about the Johnny Cash backstory) not that you could be either male or female. If you were to meet up with someone on here they would expect a female to arrive then a man turns up...

Women might be speaking 'freely' assuming you are another woman.

Just another reason to be wary I suppose. Sigh.

Yes two antenatal groups, we chat daily on WhatsApp and have regular meet ups.

hi sparkling sorry quote thing doesn't seem to work on my end. it is a genuine point you have made. that's why if i did get friendly with anyone on here i would pm at absolute first opportunity. suppose i just thought well, everyone else calls themselves all sorts of names on here and a lot are just the strangest/funniest usernames that just thought oh well why not. absolutely didn't join the boards to pretend to be a person i'm not,sadly something which happens all too often on such forums hense why people are so wary and uncertain. too many weirdos, you can never truly know who is who. obs if it does become a problem i will ahve to think about an nc to something more appropriate or different.

if i did get friendly with anyone on here i would pm at absolute first opportunity.

If I was chatting with a poster & then they sent a PM to say they were male I’d be quite WTF. I think better to mention your sex on whatever thread you’re chatting to them on.

My Facebook is full of MNers, mostly from antenatal groups on here. I've met up with a few IRL too.

@EmpressWitchDoesntBurn yes. i totally understand that. still stand by what i said though that no way did i set up this username or my account to dupe anybody. you do have to be so so careful on such forums i would actually feel very wary about getting too friendly with anyone from a forum unless somehow we had ended up with daily contact with each other and it would ahve to be over a certain length of time. ps didn't put into my op but the username i chose also reminds me of a very dar friend who i miss a great deal. but maybe both you and sparkling are right in that its deceptive to many people who maybe have only come to my posts recently.

bloody shit spelling"dear friend"

I met people from baby centre many moons ago who I am still friends with x

Female friends, yes. Male friends or something akin to OLD, fuck no!

Yes. I've got antenatal group friends, but also a feminist group who've infiltrated all sorts of areas of my life - I collaborate at work with someone I met on here and it amuses me every now and again when people ask how we know each other (and I usually mumble something about shared feminist interests).

(I also would ignore a PM from a man on MN. Especially one using a woman's name and asking questions about actual friendships, TBH.)

I haven't and I wouldn't, I have no interest in meeting anybody from online.

Lots.

@SarahAndQuack fare point. it was a genuine question based on how the forum is run with nobody using real names,you don't need to post a photo of yourself. whether it would look more exceptable to you if my username was something totally stupid i din't know but you are right to exercise caution. maybe there needs to be a rule that you sign up with your real name, which is only visible to mn hq so that if any members do have problems with another member mn can act to delete that person quicker. although they probably keep a note of all email addresses used somewhere.

No, I don't think it has anything to do with real names or anonymity or anything else, I'm just not remotely interested in meeting up with men or with the sort of person who fishes for answers about who wants to meet up and why. It's creepy. IME women usually have a good radar for creepy.

About 10 years ago a bunch of us - 5 or 6 - all ended up posting on each others threads about divorce so we set up a Facebook group. We supported each other through thick and thin, dealing with the twunt stbxhs, through online dating disasters, new relationships and all the challenges they can bring and general life stuff. We met in person a handful of times, but we live so far away there’s only two that see each other more regularly. Through them I also have lots of other great people on my FB too.

I also set up a step parenting group on FB as the forum on here is so awful, where only supportive and understanding SMs are allowed!

And another group for people who feel like they don’t have any friends IRL, just for a chat, although both groups have gone a bit quiet, they’re still posted on occasionally.

But in relation to your later posts - we did originally meet in a public place and my kids joked that they were going to be hairy handed truckers and not who they said they were! Had I not built up a friendship and seen lots of family photos of them on their Facebook pages there’s no way I would have met them straight from here.

We women have to be careful about such things. And while men are welcome on MN, it feels a bit weird to have a man ‘infiltrating’ under cover of a woman’s name rather than “superdad123” or something.

So if you asked me if I wanted to be friends on FB and told me your real name, I’d be on full-on Catfish alert to whatever you’d posted on your FB page, especially if it didn’t match up with your username of Kirsty, and if it became apparent you were indeed a man and not ‘Kirsty’ I’d unfriend you pretty quickly.

Can I also just put out a plea to other longtime MNers not to point out the bleeding obvious about how we know who is a regular MNer and who thinks this is NMs . I nearly did, and then I thought better of it as I realised that giving anyone the info they need to better disguise themselves as a MNetter would be a stupid move!

gosh yes @MarkRuffaloCrumble. you would find my fb strange anyway because i have a lot of people who are from overseas in spanish speaking countries so often write my posts in spanish for them people as i have so many. but no way am i a cat fish. I have. reported catfishing from other people in the past and tbf when i chose my username for mn tbf i never really gave it a thought what people would think as the chances of meeting anyone from here are pretty remote anyway. plus so many users call themselves all kinds of whacky names i just never really gave it a thought. its only second time i name changed my first username was actually closer to my real name which was why i changed it in case i ever needed advice and was reckognised by anyone who i didn't want to reckognise me.

maybe there needs to be a rule that you sign up with your real name, which is only visible to mn hq so that if any members do have problems with another member mn can act to delete that person quicker. although they probably keep a note of all email addresses used somewhere.

The problem there is that there are a highly dodgy group of people who make it their business to report & target FWR posters & would love to be able to get hold of that kind of information. It would be a big risk.

Nowadays I only meet up with people I know in real life or have real life friends in common with.

well all. thanks for all the responses here. i don't know if there is a name change limit to be aware of but maybe next time i post it will be with a nc which is moe appropriate to my sex. i just never thought that anyone would really care about somthingg like a username or whether they were talking to a man or a woman. as for anyon who thought i was posting to catfish, sincere apologies if i gave that impression to any of the posters. was totaly not my intention. the question was based on a true curiosity especially as i have also seen the same usernames pop up on multiple threads.

A man posting under the name Kirsty, nothing odd about this.