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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

...to think 'partner' means a cohabiting partner, not just boyfriend.

376 replies

fideline · 27/02/2014 19:29

This has twice caused major confusion recently.

I realise most of the time it doesn't really matter much, but referring to someone you are 'just' dating as your partner is confusing wrong.

Isn't it?

OP posts:
blessedhope · 04/03/2014 11:16

AgathaF I'm nothing like a Puritan on Blackadder! I know it's a comedy, but that misses a huge gap between my actual belief in general moderation and the portrayed Pharisaical rejection of normal parts of life as evil.

Disapproving of chairs for being too comfortable and wanting to replace them with spikes is hardly comparable to suggesting that marriage is the right context for sex, love should be a prerequisite for getting into bed with someone, or that there's something decadent about a responsible church-going older woman having her man's blessing [ahem] for complete sexual freedom- when she clearly has the emotional maturity to control herself.

Why all the extreme reactions? Do you think there is some binary division in the world on attitudes toward love, sex and marriage- with there being only ultra-sensualists and 'prudish religious fundamentalists'? That is one heavily distorted picture.

blessedhope · 04/03/2014 12:18

Just done MN search for marfisa (given as she searched for mine and then put up an at best quasi-accurate description of my past posts, it was fair game)... she was brought up in a Religious Right Jerry Falwell type Evangelical home and was beaten by someone who obviously took 'spare not the rod' far too literally. She still finds it emotionally draining to deal with relatives who don't support feminism or the homosexual agenda. This may help explain her extreme support for free love and ultraliberal politics.. I got born-again at sixth form college, following a secular upbringing with my mum being Buddhist and my dad agnostic.

Sorry to hear about your childhood experiences marf and yes to use your expression Jesus is much nicer than beating a kid...I can understand now better why you find it so difficult to accept Him as Saviour and Lord if His name was invoked to sanctify cruelty when you were too young and vulnerable to defend yourself Sad.

I was horrified to read that some British Christian homeschoolers, a circle we have contacts in, were getting Debi and Michael Pearl to come over from Tennessee Sad. They are fundamentalists with the sort of patriarchal views I've only found among London Haredi Jews and bearded/full-veiled Muslims in this country, certainly not adhered to among any large group of UK Christians for a century or more. But while they are free to believe and preach what they want about gender roles in society their shocking "parenting" book To Train Up a Child should be prosecutable IMHO, what it advocates is nothing but abuse according to any child protection resource produced in our lifetimes. The (mis)use of the Bible to justify this disgusting method of 'training' a child like an animal, instead of raising them like a human being, is just... Angry.

Pro-safeguarding church service if anyone needs to be reassured the vast majority of churches are now doing their best to keep children safe, (yes even the Catholics- who are unfairly pounced on because of their size and familiarity... there are abusers in all faiths and none.)

KellyElly · 04/03/2014 13:15

I think it's also an age thing. If you had a partner at 50, I wouldn't imagine you would refer to them as your boyfriend/girlfriend.

BitOutOfPractice · 04/03/2014 13:30

Blessed I feel you have massively overstepped a mark by trawling thorough marf's past posts in some kind of tit for tat attack. Let alone your appalling attempt to psychoanalyse her as a result of your "findings". Very very shabby behaviour IMHO.

I am reporting your post.

TillyTellTale · 04/03/2014 14:09

marriage is the right context for sex

I detected absolutely no difference in the quality or quantity of my sex life between the day before we got married and the day after we got married, and on behalf of humankind I utterly resent your unthinking tacit promulgation that that forced intercourse is okay, so long as people are married.

Trigger warning
This child was married. She died as a result of rape. Her death

Placing an emphasis on that diddly little concept of consent, rather than whether someone has gone through a marriage ceremony, is not extreme or particularly ultra-liberal of Marfisa. If you want to hear about extreme ideas, I once encountered a married couple who set each other on fire as part of foreplay.

The phrase "homosexual agenda" was once a great way to make "people campaigning against discrimination" sound sinister, but it's a little bit tired now. hotelnetcell.com/images/homosexual%20agenda.jpg

The "agenda" is for people to have the same rights, regardless of whether they are gay, straight or bi. So short, it's hardly worth terming an agenda! Can we not call this non-list (there's one thing on it, for Pete's sake) an agendum?

I've recently name-changed, so I'll save you the trouble of trying to work out my past. Hmm I had a broadly secular/atheistic upbringing, but we had lots of religious books on the shelves. As this is a country with a Christian past, and an emphasis on Christian tradition, I naturally absorbed Christian precepts over the others and assumed I was Christian as a teenager. It was also, as things go, a mediocre way to do the rebellion thing. (I know a sixth-former who presently identifies as Wiccan, because that annoys her parents.)

Christianity died a death when I read the Bible (that my mother had received as a school prize as a child), and found it did not meet my moral standards. This remains the case. Despite my different background to marfisa, I also find it draining to interact with people who do not support my right to have the same opportunities as men, as well as people who talk about the "homosexual agenda". Perhaps the fact that Marfisa disagrees with you is not something you can simplistically write off as an ickle woman blindly reacting against her abusive childhood?

It looks like a nuanced, considered philosophy, which draw on her experiences of life. The fact that she has experienced things you haven't, and may even have a wider experience of life in general, doesn't make her thoughts invalid.

In my experience, people who call themselves "pro-family" are exactly the people who wouldn't call Social Services on a physically abused child until the child was near-death. As for emotional and psychological abuse? Forget it. I am glad that you can see the abuse sanctioned by To Train Up a Child at a distance, but I am not convinced you would recognise it close-up. After all, just look at how you tried to silence a woman's right to participate in a philosophical discussion by bringing up that she had experienced abuse.

Your posts in this thread damn you far more than anything Marfisa brought up.

blessedhope · 04/03/2014 15:01

"Pro-family" as code for anti-safeguarding? I've heard people call it code for homophobia, misogyny, or anti-secularism before (all of which apply to certain extremists who call themselves pro-family, but are far from the normal denotation of that phrase) but that is really stretching things. I don't know anyone who thinks being pro-family is about refusing to take action to protect a child from their abusers.

I don't discount any person's ability to take part in a philosophical discussion based on their past experiences. I was just mentioning that because she has made it clear on this site before that the visceral antipathy to conservative Christianity which I could detect in her posts against me is linked to her parents being right wing evangelicals and physically abusive. That doesn't make her beliefs about sexuality more or less valid; but it is of relevance in that it foments an understandable bias against my faith which could explain why she was so harsh on me when I had not intended to incite her or anyone else on here: accusing me of "homophobia", "extremism", "fundamentalism", being "very very judgemental", saying she's glad most people on MN don't think like me, assuming I was a troll until she looked up my name, and so on.

I also don't see anyone as ultra-liberal because they believe in consent. Who told you ultra-liberal= 'not a rape apologist'? I called her that based on her ideology, here and on other threads. One indicates she's moved between the US, Britain and France; it seems to me there has been a confluence of intellectual poison from the north London elitist set who believe everyone is perfectible if only they had the right social circumstances, the godless gender-bending postmodernist deconstructors of the Sorbonne and the crackpot, 'San Francisco values', 'Michael Moore wing' of the US Democratic party (which thinks Obama's not going nearly far enough) bent on cultural warfare.

blessedhope · 04/03/2014 15:09

Bit did you report this?

I was thinking troll too but then I searched for blessed's other posts, and if she is a troll, well, she is a remarkably consistent one. Think a potent mixture of homophobia and prayer.

Trawling through my past posts unprovoked, questioning my sincerity, then alleging "homophobia" on my part...
Consistency is a moral value.

BitOutOfPractice · 04/03/2014 15:19

No I didn't blessed a. Because I didn't see it at the time and b. she didn't use that search to reproduce details from your life to justify her own, rather extreme views

I said earlier in this thread that pro-family is often a term used to justify the worst kind of prejudice and narrow minded bigotry.

TillyTellTale · 04/03/2014 15:49

No-one who identifies as "pro-family" thinks it's about protecting abusers. No-one thinks of themselves as evil, unless they have serious self-esteem issues, or they're trying too hard to be cool. But from the outside, that is what happens.

When you start from a point of view that promotes the unit of the "family" above all, and identify yourself with that, you will not see the needs of the individuals within. The needs of children are sadly often not the same as what the family needs to stay together or cohesive.

Ever heard someone speak about the "dissolution of the family" or something? Did you ask yourself what kind of good, loving family would be dissolved by modern life? Modern life allows people to escape from families which don't work, to put it in euphemistic terms.

Oh, and I have a much greater chance of encountering someone who thinks that parents are entitled to force their child to get married against their will amongst people who identify as "pro-family" than as "children's rights" activists.

Your posts on this thread are extremely reminiscent of the American Family Association, to whom I was once stupid enough to give my email address. Over reading those e-mails every week for years, I became very clear how pro-children's rights they are...

I don't discount any person's ability to take part in a philosophical discussion based on their past experiences.

Yes you did. And it's attitudes like yours, which silence adults throughout their lives, thus allowing fundamentalists to claim that child abuse is new and due to modern lifestyles. Rather than recognising that the modern world is slowly evolving to condemn abusive parents who think they have rights, rather than responsibilities.

Marfisa's posts very clearly indicate that she believes in consent, as do I. You call that "ultra-liberal". She has hardly been trying to press-gang anyone into a 24/7 free-love orgy.

No-one needs to "tell" me that "ultra-liberal" equals anything in particular. I watch people. I note their stated opinions, and how they react to situations. I then record the mis-matches and hypocrisies, and their frequency across a movement on a spreadsheet so large, that it rivals the Earth in size (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference) and divine meaning accordingly.

You should possibly consider a name-change to JacquelineReacher, in honour of the reaching you have done. Marfisa's opinions are because she's lived in the US and France? Marfisa may have lived within the US, but have you not seen the size of it? That's a bloody lazy attitude to the world. "You've been in America, so you must have been brainwashed by the American left". www.ezilon.com/maps/images/northamerica/us06pol.gif

Why would you necessarily assume she'd been anywhere near the Sorbonne? While not on the scale of America, France isn't a tiny Hebridean island. It's about as reasonable as assuming someone who lives in Britain has visited Cambridge... And actually, why do you hate the Sorbonne universities/district? Did it feature in a study on the safest places in Europe to be transgender? Or are you one of those dreadful bores with a complex about attending the "university of life"?

Not insignificantly, I have never left England, and I agree with all her posts in this thread. Perhaps it's my provincialness showing? Do you need to have visited every corner of the UK, but no further, in order to see the light?

TillyTellTale · 04/03/2014 15:53

Oh, and the only person I know who is "gender-bending" is actually a polytheist, not godless. Grin Will call to say they're Doing It Wrong.

Perhaps it's because they're not French and only French "gender-benders" are godless? (And no, they don't come from San Francisco, or any other part of the US, either.)

blessedhope · 04/03/2014 17:47

Subscribed to the American Family Association, you say? Was okay under Donald Wildmon, a fairly restrained Methodist who said the odd thing I couldn't go along with but generally supported decency and moral values. Since that fanatic Bryan Fischer, with his 'no Muslims in the US', 'African Americans rut like rabbits because they get welfare', 'gays caused the Holocaust because Hitler couldn't get straights to be that brutal', 'AIDS is caused by anal sex and has nothing to do with HIV' stupidity, took over as their mouthpiece I haven't had respect for them. The US right wing in general has been getting stupid and over the top as of late (shutdown, anti-Obama racism, tea partiers primarying electable Republicans, non stop bigotry against Muslims) which in turn allows the liberal culture warriors to win by default so they hopefully become less radical once they get into power

Like the far left moonbat SIECUS (one of the groups AFA was started to battle against) isn't quite so extreme as it was under the infamous Mary S. Calderone, when they accused the Reagan/Bush administrations of pushing 'fear-based', 'biased' (read: pro-life/pro-family/pro-abstinence) sex education. Not that I'd support it now under Debra Haffner, an ultraliberal Unitarian preacher who rejects every point of orthodox Christianity and refuses to marry any couple who haven't already had at least oral sex. I am not kidding you! It's like she thinks unfornication is the sin. Groups like SIECUS are a nuisance to moral values supporters all around the world because their ideology gets exported via international public health links and lobbying at the UN.

TillyTellTale · 04/03/2014 17:52

In my opinion, it was not okay under Wildmon, either.

But I'm going to decadently reward myself chocolate for recognising the AFA bingo buzzwords.

fideline · 04/03/2014 18:20

"Placing an emphasis on that diddly little concept of consent, rather than whether someone has gone through a marriage ceremony, is not extreme or particularly ultra-liberal of Marfisa. If you want to hear about extreme ideas, I once encountered a married couple who set each other on fire as part of foreplay."

What do you all do to provoke these confidences? Shock Confused

I only ever get told about people's mortgage dilemmas or chilblains.

OP posts:
blessedhope · 04/03/2014 20:01

But I'm going to decadently reward myself chocolate for recognising the AFA bingo buzzwords.

Obviously you think the concept of decadence is some sort of joke... and yeah, I've seen the 'right-wing bingo' cards some people made to use during the last US election year debates. Terms like reverse discrimination (for affirmative action), culture of life, amnesty, food stamp President, Hollywood liberals, voter fraud, traditional marriage... and one you would truly hate, parental rights.

That last one referring to those evil hate-mongers who are so radical they actually think a teenage girl's parents should have some right to be informed if she's sexually active or pregnant and considering abortion. Which last time I looked was something like 81% of US voters and 63% here in the UK. But to you they're probably all just intellectually inferior bigots to be looked down on for their narrow-minded opposition to 'children's rights'.

BitOutOfPractice · 04/03/2014 20:09

Fide, I'm with you! The school run would be so much better if people told me these titbits instead of discussing the weather!

Talk about derailing your thread - I bet you wish it was just me now don't you? Wink

Blessed's views are so ridiculous it's hard to know where to start. But it is certainly true to say that (s)he is very very interested indeed in other people's sex lives, however much (s)he likes to dress it up in academic rambling

blessedhope · 04/03/2014 20:33

I'm not actually all that interested in other people's sex lives. I would actually prefer if everyone kept theirs to themselves, and there was more of a social taboo around the issue- which the sexual freedom pushers tore down, by the way, NOT those who believe or act as I do-
...but given as so many people are brazen about their exploits and not ashamed of discussing them, there needs to be countervailing voices of chastity* in the discussion.

*which includes abstaining if unmarried and having sex only with one's spouse if married, lest anyone confuse with 'celibacy' or suppose it refers to religious orders or the wearing of a physical restraint, which I've had people do before.

marfisa · 05/03/2014 00:35

the wearing of a physical restraint

There you go again, blessed, talking about chastity but sounding like soft porn. How do you do it? Grin (And yes, I know you were dismissing chastity belts, not advocating them - it still sounds like soft porn!)

Seriously, thanks to BitOutofPractice and Tilly for your supportive posts. I am a little weirded out by blessed trawling through my old posts and bringing up my messy/traumatic childhood, but clearly the post I made about her and homophobia upset her a lot. It may well have violated MN talk guidelines (due to the mention of trolling) and I wouldn't mind it being deleted. I also could have made it clearer that I was objecting to ideas in the posts rather than to the person herself.

For the record, blessed also sent me a 2,000 word PM two days ago, carrying on the conversation in the thread. I was taken aback, but intended to PM her back. I haven't done so yet because work has been driving me mad for the last two days and because a PM that lengthy is a little intimidating TBH. When I didn't reply she came back to the thread and started posting about me. Blessed, I'm sure your intentions are good but this feels slightly stalkery and uncomfortable. Ahem.

I love this quote though:
One indicates she's moved between the US, Britain and France; it seems to me there has been a confluence of intellectual poison from the north London elitist set who believe everyone is perfectible if only they had the right social circumstances, the godless gender-bending postmodernist deconstructors of the Sorbonne and the crackpot, 'San Francisco values', 'Michael Moore wing' of the US Democratic party (which thinks Obama's not going nearly far enough) bent on cultural warfare.

That is the most glamorous imagined life anyone has ever come up with for me and I will cherish it! Grin Too bad the reality is so much more boring...

marfisa · 05/03/2014 00:37

For what it's worth, my relationship with religious fundamentalism IS more complicated than 'my religious fundamentalist parents beat me, therefore I hate fundamentalism'. For one thing, they were intelligent, loving people who thought they were doing the right thing. Yet because of the intolerance of their belief system, they made other people suffer and they suffered a lot themselves. And in that sense, I don't think they were atypical of fundamentalists. I don't mean that physical suffering is involved necessarily: I'm thinking of the psychological suffering that comes with the pressure to conform to certain rigidly defined rules of behaviour and belief.

Incidentally, a fascinating stat from the USA: the US states with the lowest divorce rates are 'liberal', 'blue' Democratic states like Massachusetts. The states with the highest divorce rates are 'red' conservative Republican states. Here's an article about it:
www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/21/divorce-study_n_4639430.html

This evidence jives with my own (obviously anecdotal) experience. Telling people not to live together unless they're married, not to have sex unless they're married, not to have any sexual relationships apart from heterosexual monogamous ones: well, these rules actually DECREASE people's chances of ending up in stable long-term relationships. Whereas a depraved ultra-liberal like myself, who thinks that homosexuality and bisexuality and polyamory and transgendered identities and divorce and contraception and not getting married and boyfriends and partners and fuckbuddies are all A-OK ... well, somehow in my own life I have ended up being in a straight monogamous relationship for some twenty years now. Which means that I am simultaneously the most radical and the most boring member of my extended family. Grin

Theoretically I'm still very interested in the 24/7 free love orgy though.

marfisa · 05/03/2014 00:38

Forgot to do clicky link:

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/21/divorce-study_n_4639430.html

AnandaTimeIn · 05/03/2014 00:40

I have a husband thank you. and before that I had a fiancé and before that a boyfriend. I dislike the current trend of being generic about everything.

Smug marrieds, don't you hate them....

My partner and I have a long distance relationship.

Whatever works in love is o.k. with me.

fideline · 05/03/2014 00:43

Blessed pp are quite right - bit off to psychoanalyse Marfisa based on old threads

OP posts:
caruthers · 05/03/2014 01:05

Smug marrieds doesn't come into it.

When someone is married they are married because they want to be married.

Whatever configuration is good for you then just dip your bread and enjoy...just don't sound so bitter about it.

fideline · 05/03/2014 01:07

Bless you and your dogged efforts to reason the beetroot-faced Caruthers

OP posts:
fideline · 05/03/2014 01:07

reason with the beetroot-faced*

OP posts:
gertiegusset · 05/03/2014 01:16

Blah, blah, blah
If you're going out with someone then he is your boy/man/blokey friend.

You live with your partner like an old married couple.

Or a new married couple...whatever.

Your boyfriend is not yet your partner.

Your partner shares stuff like children and bills and debts and anniversaries.