Why do situations always escalate so quickly for Mumsnetters?

[CurlewKate]

It’s as if they live in an alternative universe….In around 40 years of adult life I don’t think I’ve ever been screamed at by a stranger in a shop, been suddenly called a bitch or a cunt by a family member… the list goes on.

Well I think a lot of the scenarios are on MN for the very reason they are extreme and not most people's normal.

On the other hand for people like myself everyday life is never straightforward and has always been fraught with problematic situations. Probably because of my Autism, my mental health and my almost total lack of any support system. Life is generally something to be survived.

You are lucky if your life is lacking in unpleasant drama. Some of us have been dealt a more difficult hand.

Well I think a lot of the scenarios are on MN for the very reason they are extreme and not most people's normal

But they are normal for a lot of posters. They post some totally ludicrous situation peppered with exaggerations/embellishments, people screaming and falling to the floor like a bad drama and then seem totally taken aback that not everyone lives their lives like the central character in the season finale of a long-running series.

@Releasemeplease I'm sorry that things are so hard for you - but you probably aren't the sort of poster that OP is referring to.

Noone is going to post that they went to Tesco and had a totally normal shopping trip are they.

Sadly, being called a bitch, or a cunt or any number of things is a very common reality for many women becuase, to be quite honest, lots and lots of people don't like women, including other women.

So women in families that are deeply misogynist and paternalistic.

Women who dont' do what other people (men) want. You know the ones - a woman who doesn't agree to go out with a man, who doesn't accept the drink, who doesn't want to talk to him in the queue at the post office, the one who doesn't stop to chat when he "compliments" her breasts... basically, the ones who say no.

Women who challenge the status quo (I got called a fucking bitch just this weekend because I suggested that rather than making ME move out of HIS way, a man could move out of mine.)

Women who prioritise themselves. Or stand up for themselves.

Women who are better than men. My best friend likes to say, "Save me from the hurt feelings of a mediocre white man being shown up for his own incompetence".

Because most are very much the truth stretched, and this has to be added in for further engagement or for rage bait.

Look how many posts there are of things like

Actual
I had a chat with my neighbour as they are blocking my drive with visitors cars, and dh couldn't get out. So she asked her visitor to move the car and apologized for the inconvenience.

The MN version would be

I had it out with my neighbour as once again I'm blocked in. I went round there banging on the door and they refused to answer. So I shouted over the fence and got her told to move that fucking car before I put a dent it in. Then she called the police on me. So I send her a message telling her she is thick as pig shit and her husband is having if off with the neighbour the other side. Oh and her dog poo is rank and I can smell it my side, so told her I'm calling the RSPCA as that is downright cruelty feeding it shit food.

Most of this posts are very stretched from the real situation imo.

Some people are just a lot more dramatic.

Both my sister and a close friend regularly get into situations I know would never happen to me:
'.. and then he said he'd burn my house down..',
'.. and I fell over and the police threatened to arrest me,..',
'... and she put the ring footage of us fighting on the doorstep on Facebook..'.

Nope, I can guarantee I'll never be saying any of that and I've no idea how it escalated to this point.

I think people often augment their stories in order to get the response they want, eg OP wants to post about an exchange in a shop where she felt another customer was rude to her. In reality that customer was just a bit snippy, but OP adds the swearwords/screaming to make sure that readers perceive the situation as she intends. Not sure it's always as deliberate as that sounds though- more that a poster is trying to represent how the exchange felt to her and struggling to convey it with accurate quotes.

I once read on here about a situation I experienced IRL being described by someone who felt aggrieved by it, and that's exactly how it seemed- they had added a large sprinkling of falsehoods on top of the basic facts to shape how people responded. Some posts are better read as if they had an invisible "it felt to me as if..." at the start of them.

Some boards can attract a cacophony of shrill posters. If they are real I am tempted to suspect hormonal imbalances are rife among them. I don't know anyone in RL who choose get so offended en masse that they attack and bundle on with quite so much venom over maybe a slightly poorly thought through sentence which was obviously not intended to be offensive. There are some who are perpetual victims and their cohort seem to buoy them up to get aggressive, rather than consider another pov, to the point where another pov is simply not acceptable AT ALL! It is what I would call rage baiting, because so many of the posters who come along to goad these OP's do seem to be so blinkered and incandescent with rage at any minor situation.

I had it out with my neighbour as once again I'm blocked in. I went round there banging on the door and they refused to answer. So I shouted over the fence and got her told to move that fucking car before I put a dent it in. Then she called the police on me. So I send her a message telling her she is thick as pig shit and her husband is having if off with the neighbour the other side. Oh and her dog poo is rank and I can smell it my side, so told her I'm calling the RSPCA as that is downright cruelty feeding it shit food.

Until I met exBIL, I'd have agreed with you that this kind of situation was unlikely. But that man can escalate a minor issue like no one I've ever met. Poor SIL is damaged by association and is counting the days until their DC are finished at primary school. He has managed to have this exact sort of fall out with half a dozen people (usually after first bad mouthing SIL extensively) and yes, at least one parent at the school has threatened to escalate his behaviour to the police (I dont' think they did, but I'm not sure).

Until I moved to where I live now, I used to take a lot of those threads with a massive pinch of salt.

But now that I see parents scrapping in the school playground, people screaming at each other in the local park and hear tales of people’s families being utterly toxic, I know it’s all true.

The absolute drama of where I live now (‘midlands town, sandwiched in between two notorious council estates), it feels like Eastenders some days.

I don’t know; if you did someone would probably start an argument with you over it!

One poster last week was going on about a certain type of masked man (they meant not white, obviously) and then said she was seeing them so often because she was part of some particular group. Very vague and I suspected "she" was part of the mobs who go to protest immigration. That poster was going batshit because I had seen the groups of white men in balaclavas near my home and that was the most threatening mob of men I had seen. I said I was more concerned about the mob I had seen but they couldn't accept that and said I was picking and choosing which men I found threatening! Even when I said "it's all men though, isn't it. Men who want to be violent are the issue" they couldn't let it go and tried to do a bizarre gotcha post saying I had exposed myself and my "ideologies"... That is what I mean by completely loopy and unable to see past the end of their own noses because they want to stoke division.

The posts that recount verbatim a disagreement with a stanger for example, I simply never believe them. Also the threads about affairs where things move on rapidly with constant updates. Absolute bullshit that so many get sucked into. I think many people make up stories for something to do.

This used to genuinely perplex me. All the people on MN who constantly get dirty looks or strangers being rude out of the blue, which has happened to me maybe twice in my life.

Then once I was walking through town with my friend and twice she complained to me that someone had given her a dirty look. It was completely in her imagination, these people were just going about their day and didn't seem to even notice her.

I found it really eye opening.

I did! I did today! The tills were working, shelves were full and nobody assaulted or arrested me. Strange sort of shopping trip really.

@Morecoffeeneedef

Come on! You know that everyone was judging you the whole time. Someone has probably already made the referral to social services. I look forward to the thread about you later.

Well the obvious answer is that a lot of them are made up. Of the ones that are real, people don't generally start threads the first time something small happens. By the time they reach the stage of starting a thread on here about it, it's actually just one small part of a massive situation, as we see almost every time when a woman posts about something off her partner has done but as the thread continues, the bigger picture emerges and it's clear the argument isn't about what the argument is about.

People call it drip feeding and sometimes it is, but very often the woman just hasn't realised how serious and huge the issue is; she just knows that this thing has made her feel so bad she needs to talk to us about it. She's either in denial or just hasn't registered how serious it actually all is. And that can, without context, look like a very fast and weird escalation even though it's been brewing for ages.

Ot sometimes a person is giving us a highly unreliable and biased account and wants to make the other person look unreasonable and hysterical so they don't include the build up to the explosion.

True that people were judging me all the time and reporting me to social services and the police, but that's normal surely.

There does seem to be a fair few of these overly dramatic scenarios on MN lately @CurlewKate. I call it the ‘East Enders effect’. It’s mostly made up.

Are you still shaking and crying?

Because they so often don't use their words and speak to people.

Yes, and I've vomited twice.

Log with 101 and report a data breach under GDPR xxxxx

Yes! I know several people like this.

Always convinced shop assistants are sneering at them, waitstaff are bitching about them, neighbours are snooping in their bins, colleagues are sabotaging them, family are ‘spreading lies’, everyone’s ripping them off, friends are stabbing them in the back, etc.

Mishearing people being perfectly polite as having said bizarre or offensive things, bumping into people on the pavement and then screaming at them to watch where they’re going.

They are borderline psychotic imo, either very paranoid or unwittingly driven by a deep need for aggression and conflict.

My view is there are some people who are deeply unpleasant and frustrated with life, very noticeable when driving, even shopping, but I can count on one hand the times they have drawn me into their little world.

I do think some people get involved when they really shouldn't....then probably dash home to write about it on MN.