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’m surprised by how many posters don’t understand that you can get different weather in different parts of the UK at the same time.

I was shocked, and slightly shamed,by the amount of laundry and housework most people do. Clearly I am a slut living in a midden!

Also, anywhere "abroad" must always be warm and sunny. So many posts where people are surprised/disappointed that they go on holiday and the weather is...well...weather.

I could send you photos from my son’s student house kitchen which shows real squalor.

They also had a hoover that came with the house which didn’t work when they moved in, and they never bothered telling the landlord. 🤢

That my exH was the controlling one, not me. That it’s not normal for a new dad to be staying out all night drinking with his mates and leaving me to deal with a newborn who woke up hourly at night leaving me exhausted the next day and he’d come home at midday and go to bed. When I objected to this I was not being controlling at all despite what he claimed.

That it is impossible to eat any kind of chocolate, biscuits, cake, crisps, and bread EVER, nevermind every day and still lose weight despite me being evidence to the contrary. Except for the cake, I rarely eat cake.

How little exercise a lot of people do.

How children can’t possibly be expected to walk anywhere and expecting them to walk a mile to school in winter is almost equal to abuse. Poor darlings might get cold and/or wet and die of hypothermia.

How poor reading comprehension is.

How being a full time carer for an elderly parent isn’t ok if you need to claim benefits and women should get a full time job too.

How ignorant many people are about autism and ADHD. If you survived to your 40s without a diagnosis then you can’t possibly have either and you’re just after benefits and special
treatment. The fact your life has been a mess of varying degrees all along is neither here nor there.

That the FWR board is full of intelligent and witty women who are fighting for us all.

That a lot of men are more depraved and generally worse than my own experiences taught me.

How little I knew about politics and things like the a Good Friday Agreement.

How a read of Classics can turn a bad day into day that ends in laughter.

How people are struggling on salaries beyond my imagination.

I’ve always been fascinated by the claim
that things only happen on mumsnet and not in real life. Are posters on here not real people? Sure, some people post absolute BS but I find people struggle to believe that things aren’t true outside of their own experiences.

That whenever I’m stuck and need help I can turn to mumsnet and get suggestions and solutions. I don’t have friends IRL and use mumsnet a lot for my social interaction and advice. Some advice is batshit but a lot of posters have offered great advice and this has been especially helpful with my elderly mum and my dc.

I’ll always be grateful to the poster who helped me out with essential school equipment when I was skint and dc’s dad wouldn’t buy anything for high school.

How strangers on the internet support others. I got so much support when DS’s dad died suddenly and unexpectedly. He had no interest in Ds and only saw him once as a baby but I was met with kindness and I formation on how to get support for ds.

Conversely, how utterly vile some posters can be to others in need and pick on their spelling and grammar instead of offering anything supportive.

I joined mumsnet in around 2018 and I think I was looking for help with a now ex. I got my arse handed to me a few times at first and learnt a lot.

As a result of the relationships board and others I’ve learnt to value myself and to raise my bar when it comes to men. It’s made me try to instil the same standards for male behaviour in my DDs. That’s still a battle thanks to their dad but I’ll keep going. I feel a great sense of responsibility to raise Ds to be a good man who values women and doesn’t engage in misogyny.
Thanks to mumsnet I don’t feel the need to have a man to complete me. I’m complete as myself. I was raised in a society that said women needed to be married to be deemed worthy and successful. My mum still wants to see me married because that’s how she was brought up. She is baffled that I can be happy single.

That some people genuinely don’t want children and are happy with their choice. When I was younger I thought they’d change their minds and found it hard to believe they really didn't want children.

I think I’ve also learnt that despite being relatively poor, not having great qualifications at GCSE due to school refusal as a teen, being single, a full time carer, single and lone parent, not being able to drive and probably a whole host of other ‘deficiencies’, that I’m a valuable member of society and that I’m actually doing well and raising my dc to succeed.
I do have a degree and a few post-grad qualifications but the lack of a good hand of GCSEs still bugs me. People make assumptions that I’m uneducated because I’m “not working”. Try being on call 24/7 for an elderly relative and say you’re not working when you’ve experience it yourself.

I love mumsnet. It’s a place of humour, support and experiences I’ll never have or understand. It’s also a cesspit at times but I still love it. It’s taught me a lot and I’ll always be grateful for that.

I’d never heard the words “cognitive dissonance” until MN.

That a lot of people don't have friends, or have one "friend" who is horrible.

The baby name responses are incredibly insular which really shocked me. I come across different & foreign names all the time through work, acquaintances, school etc.

As pp said, it’s shorn that’s different. It sometimes sounds like Shaun, but in my Irish accent it doesn’t.

You can hear the difference in this link I think.
https://forvo.com/word/shorn/

You learnt this from Mumsnet?

Do you mean that you now think this is true?

Thank you, yes, exactly!

If we’re talking pronunciations, I only learned from Mumsnet that “draw” and “drawer” sound like completely different words to some people.

@Dontevenlookatme @CatCaretaker and @Toomanyteeth

Thank you for being patient with me.

I am originally from South London and would pronounce Shaun and shorn the same.

Learned
How shit blending families is for children
How many men expect the step mum to parent their kids
How many women settle for weed smoking gamers
How many women are not protecting themselves financially
How many women are being mentally and physically abused by their teens and adult children

How many women will have a child/more children at all costs.

A depressing number of women are in awful, unequal relationships, and in some cases aren’t even aware.

Some people are incredibly under-informed about basic geography, history, current affairs.

DH does do almost all the food shopping and cooking and some of the laundry, but I still get told on here regularly that other Mumsnetters have DHs who do more (he definitely doesn't do 50%). And yet I know only ONE other dad who does as much

The Script and how many women who have been cheated on go for the other woman, rather than understanding their actual partner was the one supposed to treat them with respect, not some random he picked up.

Sadly how many men never want to marry, load women with kids then bugger off at the first opportunity usually not paying child support.

I think for a lot of women seeing how common these behaviours are thanks to the internet has changed our perspective on marriage and men over the last 20 years. Fewer women fight women for bad men now, although it still happens at times. The depravities men do to each other but mostly to women are sadly not a surprise to us any more.

The number of people who still think that marriage is just a piece of (unimportant) paper.

No it isn't. It is probably the most important legal document you own.

Things I have learned.

That a total stranger can sometimes see things more clearly than you can.
It's been said already, but the poor level of reading comprehension. "I'm worried about my 2 year old son." "How old is she?"
That there are some really knowledgeable posters about SEN who will spend endless time helping others. I eventually got all the information I needed but it would have been so hard to find it out any other way.
That a lot of parents don't really support schools and teachers and are overly credulous about what their children tell them (to be fair some schools and teachers aren't very nice but my parents always supported our teachers whatever their personal opinions about them).
That there are a lot of intelligent and well informed women out there who want to debate economics and finance and politics and sociology.
That a significant number of people think paid for babysitting is a terrible thing!

How much women care about their boob size. Honestly, the biggest revelation.

Oh, and that a lot of British people think it's healthy and correct to not wear pants in bed. Only one person IRL ever mentioned that idea to me.

How much some people are tuned into pop culture, knowing celebrities or events I otherwise never heard of. We are all in our own bubbles, right?

Lots of Other stuff, like people twisting your words around so some meaning you struggle to imagine & certainly never meant... that happens anywhere on the Internet. I think the rampant MNer misandry is specific to just some websites like MN, not a general feature of most women or the Internet.

Yeah this one always confuses me - when people pick up on the most random tiny part of a post and decide to query the weather. I remember one that was something along the lines of "AIBU my mum didn't make my dd wear wellies to splash in the puddles on their walk?" and someone rocked up with "why did she need wellies, it hasn't rained today?"

Considering you can often have different weather in the exact same part of the UK from one minute to a next I don't get how people are confused about different areas! It's a minor example but on a wider scale perfectly illustrates how completely unable so many people are to see outside their own narrow experiences and world view.

See also "Nobody I know" or "everybody in my circle" does X, Y, Z.

Okay, well first of all you don't actually KNOW whatever it is about every single person you know, at best you can make assumptions, and secondly, so what, your "circle" is about 0.00001% of the population, you could all spend sunday afternoons painting yourselves green and throwing sausages at each other, that doesn't mean it's normal.

How much young women spend on their hair, face and nails plus the amount of stuff they have injected into their faces.

MN opened my eyes to the multibillion ironing market out there, seemingly endless demand for anyone who finds themselves short of cash.

And on the subject of weather, the disbelief that anyone has a different viewpoint to you.

There will be a thread inviting people who hate winter to come and have a moan, and you’ll always get a poster who says ‘But winter is wonderful, all that snuggling with blankies and hot choccy and fairy lights. Summer is awful and too hot.’