Things you learned about life from MN

[VoltaireMittyDream]

I grew up before the internet and reality TV, so all you could know about people came from fiction, and the world around you.

I never knew any cocklodgers growing up.

All the men (and most of the women) I knew were uptight, tortured workaholics - which wasn’t great either, and the men still demanded a disproportionate amount of emotional and administrative and domestic support from their female partners.

But until I joined MN I had no idea how many men out there take no pride in a work ethic or professional identity, and feel no responsibility to pay their own way. And it is SO common on here - across class and education levels and cultures and nationalities. All these freeloading men! I never knew!

I also had no idea how much variation there was in couples’ approaches to money. Long-married couples with strictly separate finances who insist on being paid half for a pint of milk. Families where all child related costs come out of the mother’s earnings & the father’s money is all his own. Couples where it’s totally normal to talk about money, and couples where it’s completely taboo.

And sex! I’m in awe of the people who have sex every day even when their fastidiousness requires them to cover the bed in special sex towels beforehand and boil wash the sheets immediately afterwards and hose themselves down with disinfectant before and after.

I also had no idea how all-consuming elder care was until my own experience brought me to the Elderly Parents board, and I discovered a whole massive parallel universe of ageing parents whose ‘independence’ comes at vast emotional, professional, and financial expense to their daughters.

What other different realities have people had their eyes opened to on here?

I thought the point of slicing the side of the wedge is that you can get a larger amount without looking so greedy.

How common going no contact with parents/siblings is, and often over stuff I'd find quite non event. There was a thread once where a poster's dad shouted at her three year old son for knocking something over. The OP "hadn't slept for days over the sadness in ds' eyes" and she wanted to go NC.Lots of posters saying he had anger issues, which could lead to potential murder if the OP continued contact, even if it was supervised.
I've also never heard of anyone being emetophobic, there was a stage years back where it seemed that 50% of posters were "completely emetophobic".
I've also never known any boys/men that carry sanpro around in their pockets, on the off chance any females in their work/school/nightclub might need it.

I know this was done to death on the thread at the time, but I still can't hear THAT much of a difference in the way eg a Devonian farmer pronounces shorn and the way I pronounce shorn ;)

When I was at secondary school a girl joined in the third year (Y9 now) from Sherborne in Dorset. I say world like whirled with a "flat" r - she used to say it like Wirral with a D. I still understood her very easily! Maybe I just tune out the differences.