Seeing polite, well-dressed young men chatting happily in a café

[TheAverageJoanne]

I'm having lunch in a really nice (not naice) coffee house and bistro. The table just next to us had three guys about 19-20 having lunch together. One white, one black, one Asian. All dressed well, one wearing a Sade retro t-shirt. Sade!! Good conversation which we could hear and not a single swear word. I don't know why this makes me really happy but it does.

I get out a lot, @HowMuchMoreIsThere which is why this surprises me. Many groups of men, young and older, in a variety of places swear their heads off and talk rubbish.

Honestly my first thought would be that they were gay. It’s a stereotype but for a reason. Despite the comments on this thread it’s pretty unusual for a group of heterosexual male friends to get dressed up and go for coffee.

What the hell??!

I can't believe I've just read this! WTAF are you on about @Sherararara?

If you struggle with comprehension try reading my post again slowly.

BTW - I showed this to my gay son,
and his first reaction- “I bet they were gay!”

Mumsnet is mental

I don't struggle with comprehension at all.

You have made a horribly stereotypical statement about gay men, with the implication that heterosexual men would behave differently - and the implication being not as well behaved as those the OP has observed.

Oh, and for the record, my DS1 is gay, and going out for a coffee with his mates is the last thing he would do. He would rather be in a bar or out watching the football.

Great thread @TheAverageJoanne

Yes, I agree. I see young men together often, and most of them they are obnoxiously loud, taking up more than their fair share of space and always always always swearing. So so tedious.

I get your pleasure at witnessing this.

I was sat in a cafe last week and a father was sat at the next table chatting away to his little boy who was barely a toddler. Just the two of them. Child wanted something he couldn't have and Dad said something like, very gently and up beat, "well you can't always have what you want in life but let's find something else" . Such a great Dad. Melted my heart after all the justified criticism bad dads get on MN.

My ds often goes for coffee with his pals. Young guys these days dont want to sit in a dingy pub. They are into the gym, meal prep, running etc. And decent coffee scores very high too.

This is what my son would say too. I think maybe some of the posters here don’t have sons!

Nor me.

Where did she say she found it surprising?

I am a secondary school teacher in a large, deprived inner city comp. The vast majority of our teens are lovely. A year 10 boy (who can be a bit naughty from time to time) offered to help me carry a heavy bag the other day. The kids are (mostly!) alright.

Exactly. I have an elderly Welsh friend who was not allowed to speak in Welsh when she went to school. Things have changed. I liked seeing road signs in Welsh and English when I was there a few years ago.

As someone who has sat in a thousand coffee shops all over the place I would also describe it as a generally rare sight to see, and when I have seen it, the young men in question have been obviously gay.

I’m sorry, but attitudes like this really piss me off. Women simpering over men doing utterly normal parenting things no woman gets praised for.

My Ex was pretty fucking crap as a husband and father ( to the point of having family support intervention and on one particularly depressing incident a social work investigations). Women simpering to H over him ‘being such a great Dad’ when they saw him in public being a completely ordinary Dad made it impossible for me to talk to him about where he had difficulties parenting his kids, because he would counter with the simpering women’s gushing about how great he was and therefore I was wrong and ‘ just being nasty’. I seriously hope you kept your thoughts private and did not gush over this completely normal parenting.

And btw, I really, really struggled parenting with a man with such inadequacy, who gave me no support and zero compliments on my parenting. It would have meant the world for a stranger to come up and offer me some praise or positive feedback as a mother. Guess how many times that happened? Zero. Because I’m just a mother, eh? Nothing special here.

@TheAverageJoanne this happened to me on a train a few years ago, three young guys, clean and tidy having the most thorough and well spoken conversation about current affairs and their own lives with well made points, reasonable reactions and kindness , with no swearing at all. I felt so cleansed after this I was going to take a photo just of their shoes and praise them on public social media 🫡

Well, what a lovely example of a multi cultural society. Wait til you hear about the English man, Irish man and Scots man who walk into a coffee shop....

I've just walked to a friend's house past a pub beer garden. You really wouldn't want to be there!

That happens with me and two colleagues most days, except it's an Englishwoman.

You have projected all of your own bitter personal experience onto my one short, positive post. I'm sorry you had such a hard time, but your comments do not apply to the situation which I witnessed over an extended period of time and have never witnessed before.

They absolutely do. You see a man behaving in an utterly normal parenting way and you gush about him being a great dad. You’ll have seen countless women parenting normally and never had such gushing thoughts. it’s not positive to think as you do. It’s utterly sexist.

Here’s a song for you.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=pfltmHtqdzM&list=RDpfltmHtqdzM&start_radio=1&pp=ygUdWW91IGFyZSBzdWNoIGEgZ3JlYXQgZGFkIHNvbmegBwE%3D&ra=m

This is so cynical come on. She saw some nice young men, maybe sixth formers and thought ‘isn’t that nice’. She might equally have seen a group of young women all dressed in vintage clothing and thought ‘how cool’. Sometimes you see interesting strangers 😐

The other day I overheard a mum talking with her son in Costa saying ‘if you see someone playing by themselves you can ask them to play’ and the boy of 4 said ‘yeah!😃’ and it so cute. I wished my boy was that well behaved!