LIGHTHEARTED - If you only ever believed things that you read on MN…

[LydiaBennetsUglyBonnet]

You’d believe that….

• If your husband so much as starts shopping in a new supermarket then he’s definitely having an affair
• Tenants who can afford to pay six months rent are drug dealers and will use a rental property as a drug farm
• Sleeping on a bench in a town centre in the middle of the day is perfectly acceptable and extremely common
• That a perfectly acceptable parenting method is, in response to your husband having a night out, to leave a tiny baby and a toddler with him while he can do nothing but vomit in the toilet. This will all end well and you’ll thoroughly enjoy spending the day sat in Costa coffee patting yourself on the back over your victory
• If somebody asks you to do something you don’t want to do, saying “No” and literally nothing else at all, is absolutely fine and gives enough context and definitely doesn’t make you sound like a massive weirdo

Any more for anymore?

That when you have clearly been unreasonable and paranoid - maybe about not being invited to everything in you local area, because you are unreasonable and paranoid- you ask 'AIBU?' in the hope that even just one random anonymous stranger will back you up. And all the rest are just NOT UNDERSTANDING you.

• That male partners earn five, six, ten times more than the female partner OR work two hours a fortnight on NMW, game all day and are cocklodgers - no middle ground.
• That most people work in ‘niche roles’
• That if a man is a little taciturn, he is definitely autistic

That you must wait and only try for a baby once you have £30k saved and have bought your own home.

It is BU to be entirely uninterested in ever trying skiing.

All MIL's are dreadful and should be NT or angels. Non of your regular flawed but doing our best humanity here please!

That most cyclists are a danger to society and none of them have passed their driving test and in fact also drive cars.

Snap!
And this works well for us as well as the weekly clean. My toilet is sparkling if that's possible. But I know when we have visitors it doesn't work so well so I bring out the brush so maybe for larger families it's more difficult. But I'm also a bit wired admittedly, about toilet brushes.!

That anyone who showers less than 3 times a day is a filthy slattern, but anyone who does is single-handedly doubling the pace of climate change.

That your DH is having an affair (or at least planning to) regardless of what the inane question or minor issue you arrived here with is.

That to put yourself to a mere moments trouble to help a friend, neighbour, or (god forbid) stranger is a mugs game, you're a mug.

But on the other hand if you need your SEN child babysitting or your Great Dane walking every day, just ask a neighbour. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I were your neighbour.

That friends are largely inconsequential and should come lower on your priority list than hitler, but also that it's so important to have friends and have you joined any mum & baby clubs, or a gym?

That your marriage will only last if you spent £3.50 on the whole thing, wore rags and held the reception in a skip (but none of your guests had to shell out a single penny for the pleasure of joining you).

And another seasonal one: I'm entitled to the Christmas leave of my choice despite not following company policy to book it. You'll understand when I drip-feed in an hours time that I have 4 kids, 6 of whom have SEN.

You should never go to A&E ever. If your leg has fallen off, you should see your GP or ring 111.

Workmen should never poo in your loo as their poo is always super smelly, whereas middle class women never poo, or if they do it smells of roses and Chanel No 5.

@Spidey66 alternatively, if your child has a slight temperature, whisk them off to the GP or A&E at the drop of a hat, because they will always see children over anyone else and it's best to get it checked out.

I thought of some more on the drive to work. Some of them on a wedding theme (I spent some time on the wedding board before ours this year).

Asking someone to do you the honour of being your bridesmaid equates to them signing over all of their spare time and money to you for the foreseeable.

It's an absolute AFFRONT to invite anyone to a wedding that is further than a 5 minute walk from their front door, you are peak CFers and you shouldn't expect anyone to attend. x10 if the wedding is in (whisper it) another country, regardless that the country is where the Bride & Groom live, or one of them is from.

It's acceptable, nay, expected to spend upwards of £2k on flowers or a live band, but favours are a colossal waste of money, and art colleges simply runneth over with amateur photographers just waiting for the call to take your wedding photos for free, for their portfolio.

Having your hair and make-up done on your wedding day is completely unreasonable and why would you want to look anything other than your day to day average, you self-absorbed instagram-thirsty narc. x5 if you pay professionals instead of having your cousin who used to work at Mac do it.

In other areas;

YOUR Mum is perfectly entitled to have a key to your home and drop in and out as she pleases, becoming a de-facto 3rd parent to your kids. In fact if she wishes to stay over and you don't have a spare room, your DH must sleep in the garage in order to accommodate her in your bed. Your in-laws, on the other hand, must visit a maximum of bi-annually, arranged well in advance, and stay in a hotel down the road. They may enter your house for no longer than an hour at a time. Having the audacity to kiss their grandchild is a direct route to you going NC. Do not pass go, do not collect £200.

If your DH initiates sex at any point, or is even low level affectionate, he's a sex pest. If he keeps his hands to himself, he's either having an affair, or you're incompatible and you should LTB.

If a Man fails to come during intercourse, even once, he is not ill, nor a little tipsy, nor worried about something, nor self-conscious, nor not really in the mood. It is DEATH GRIP and you should LTB immediately. Dirty porn monkey.

Your ducks should perpetually be in a row.

If you're short of money you should firstly check down the side of all your armchairs which should net you a tidy sun then take in ironing (because starting up an ironing business is a snap requiring no financial outlay, space to work and the means of delivering the ironed clothes at a time when people are home to receive it) failing that you should take the money out of your huge savings account.

Back in the mists of time, when MN wasn't all that old, there were quite a lot of food threads including a daily "what's for dinner?" thread. One day a poster claimed they could eat for a week from one chicken and it became a debate between those who said you can't and those who said you can.

If I remember rightly it was something like

Sunday: chicken dinner
Monday: chicken wraps
Tuesday: chicken curry
Wednesday: chicken pilaf
Thursday: chicken salad
Friday: chicken soup
Saturday: leftover soup
Sunday: start again

There were detailed instructions for each step but it basically amounted to using a tiny amount of chicken for each meal and using every single part of the bird including boiling it to get every last scrap of meat off the bones for the soup (and straining it to make stock for the freezer), there was also a reliance on "bulk it out" ingredients like rice, vegetables, lentils, etc.

The "can" camp insisted that you only need a tiny amount of meat on a meal for flavour and that it's wasteful to have loads of meat on one meal, lots of "this is why obesity is rising" comments and pondering on how anyone could possibly use a whole chicken on just one meal. The "can't" camp were adamant that you cannot eat for a week on just one chicken and that the portion sized involved are not enough, by the end of the week you'd basically just have the scent of chicken and no actual chicken.

This debate raged on for months and every so often it would be reignited by someone posting that they'd worked out a new way to use the chicken or had eaten an entire chicken by themselves in one sitting.

It was a strange time and today has evolved into those MNers who are teeny tiny and full for days from half a lettuce leaf vs those MNers who eat ten Big Macs for breakfast and are healthy as a horse.

But, realistically, nobody has ever claimed this?
It's become a bit of an MN folklore thing, where it's escalated to ridiculous levels, and is often quoted on these threads.
It's based on nothing that's ever been said though

The three weeks is exaggeration for lolz, but start a thread about how long a chicken will last you and you'll see that some people claim to be able to get 15 meals for 4 people out of it (which includes strapping manual worker DH, and 2 teenage sons who are 8ft 5, sporty, thin as whippets but eat like horses). In reality, the chickens in the supermarket barely feed two adults for one meal, let alone a Sunday dinner, sandwiches for the entire week plus a curry and leftovers for the dog.

If you do something really minor like forgot to pack your child’s pyjama bottoms for a sleepover, you HAVE to start a MN thread claiming to be the ‘worst mum ever’. That way, people can say “no you’re not” and you feel better about yourself.

Everyone’s children are 6’3” by the time they reach age 10 and are always ‘lean’. No fat children exist.

That socialising with work colleagues is an outrageous imposition on personal liberty, especially at Christmas.

Yes if Netflix is your only pleasure you should cancel it and put £10 towards the gas bill and just lie with your eyes shut imagining things instead - it’s basically the same as having Netflix

The MN A & E one is so odd.

If someone goes to A and E or calls an ambulance everyone falls over themselves to try to prove that the OP is really not that ill at all.

If someone posts that they are unwell but they don’t think it warrants an ambulance everyone shouts at the OP to call an ambulance

But there is a ‘bait the OP’ tendency on here.

Also, all weddings cost about £9.50 in total, all brides wear nighties bought from Oxfam for 50p and they feed guests foraged food. And ALL the feedback from these cheap arse weddings, from every guest is “it’s the best wedding we’ve ever been to”.

Only people who will divorce by Tuesday are tacky enough to have a posh wedding that costs 5 figures. And everybody who attends these weddings hates every second of it to the point they’d rather rip off their skin than have to endure unlimited free booze and a delicious 5 course meal and live swing band ever again.

Also it’s totally normal to be in a £100k a year WFH full time job but only turning up for work 2 hours a day. These people get 14,790 promotions a year and are gushed over from their manager about how amazing they are and the fact the spend their time being paid to attend NCT classes rather than work is a desirable quality in an employee

That it's fine to wait until you are dying, ask a load of randoms for medical advice and then ignore it.

God forbid you ever send anyone flowers!

The amount of extra work it creates defies belief.

You have to be there to receive the delivery.
Then you have to hunt around for a vase/suitable container.
Fill the vase with water.
Arrange the flowers.
Spend ages debating where they will look best.
Watch them slowly die (triggering in itself)
Throw them away.
Pour the water down the sink.
Bleach the sink.
Wash the vase.
Put the vase away.

All the time silently seething that someone has "inflicted" all this unnecessary life admin on you.

Well yes that’s the exact point of the thread 😆

That if you’re a Mumsnet landlord it was purely accidental – whoops, officer, I tripped and fell in this pile of second property! – and anyway, you’re not like other landlords, you’re extremely benevolent, doing a public service, keep your houses in premier condition and only rent to families who’d otherwise be in the poorhouse. You should be knighted, really.

Also if they don’t believe any longer at age 7 they are in the spectrum 😂