To think this is horrifically snobby

[Partyanimmal]

My best friend is a social worker. He's an approved mental health professional. He's met a guy who is a lecturer.

His boyfriend kept asking if he could meet his family so he brought me along as he said there would be a 'culture clash' between his family and his partner and his family. He says himself his family are 'straight off the set of shameless'.

I'm his best friend.

He lives in a rough area and will only
Make friends with professionals as he feels he is of a 'different culture' to those who are not in a profession. There's not many professionals there so he has a single friend in the area.

He will only date men with a professional job as he says he has nothing in common with those that don't and he once dated a refuse collector and he had nothing to say to him!!!

Now I know he's not a bad guy. But this seems so snooty to me. I mean, not many people want to be friends with a dysfunctional person but that can be any class of person.

He does have a few friends from childhood who aren't professionals but they're lovely so I think once he's met someone he's fine. He s just very wary of being fri nds with anyone who isn't a professional. He's had some awful experiences in his past so that could be why.

He'd never date someone who wasn't a professional though.

It's snobby isn't it? Or am I being unreasonable?

Hobbies as proxy for education - I met DH at a dating group for people who like opera. I didn't really like opera that much but thought people who did would want to go on city breaks to look at art galleries which is what I really wanted to do.

DH is obsessed with opera but freely admits of the women he dated before me, all of them had made the same calculation as me There was much open discussion about using it as a filter

So hobbies works just as well. Even if your hobby is say something generic like 'going to the gym', you are likely to find that someone with more education has persued it to a higher level, learned science about activity and healthy eating for example, their circle of friends at the gym is different - they aren't doing the hobby in the same way. Obviously you could do all this and be self-taught but chances are less.

You're doing the classic thing of confusing 'awareness that there are different social classes' (and no, there shouldn't be, it's a hideous anachronism in 2017 - but there are, as evidenced by practically every Mn thread ever, from private vs state schools, extra-curricular activities to baby names being 'chavvy' or 'try-hard') with 'judging people from a 'lower' social class negatively'. Your friend is not in denial about his family, he's clearly still in regular contact with them, he's out to them and likes them enough to introduce his new boyfriend to them - but he thinks, knowing both of them, that his new boyfriend and his family may have difficulty 'getting' one another at first view, so wants someone to help 'translate' to grease the wheels.

He doesn't have to have 'reinvented' himself at all or to be some kind of insecure, socially aspirational Hyancinth Bucket. I'm working-class and am an academic, and bar my old school friends (who are in my home country) the majority of my friends are friends from university, colleagues and ex-colleagues, and are overwhelmingly middle-class/upper-middle-class, because WC academics (in my field at least) are comparatively unusual.

And when my friends have happened to meet my parents (not often, as we don't live in the same country) we've almost needed an interpreter sometimes, despite my parents making, for them, enormous efforts. My parents are not 'Shameless' if by that the OP's friend means 'stereotypes of a feckless underclass' they are shy, socially ill at ease, barely educated people who worked all their lives in poorly-paid, unskilled manual jobs, have hardly ever left the city they are from, and don't know anyone who isn't very like them they are also lovely. But a 'posh', gay Asian lecturer in linguistics who jets around the world and is voluble about current affairs is another world to them. And it can mean conversation does not flow. Having someone there to help out is a perfectly sensible idea/

TheHarpy:

I think the UK class system is in a category of its own. If you are from another country, you will not necessarily be very familiar with the rather complicated ins and outs if it all.

I think it's pretty weird to be honest. Wanting partners of a similar financial position to yourself is normal, but not wanting any nonprofessional friends is quite weird, I've known a fair number of gay men in retail/bar work etc and it's not as though they had a bad time with their working class colleagues. And it's horrible to be so ashamed of his family if they're just "trashy" rather than homophobic.

Thanks for that, Cara. I can assure you that (a) other countries are not immune from similar systems and (b) that as a very longterm resident of this country, I am perfectly familiar with its class structure in all its ins and outs.

"Hobbies as proxy for education - I met DH at a dating group for people who like opera. I didn't really like opera that much but thought people who did would want to go on city breaks to look at art galleries which is what I really wanted to do."

I feel less bad now. I'm on a meetup group about philosophy, though I'm not interested in philosophy

"Wanting partners of a similar financial position to yourself is normal, but not wanting any nonprofessional friends is quite weird"

No, it's very common (in the sense of 'usual'). I know plenty of people have rejected my friendship because I'm not a professional and most people I know in cities only have friends within the same class - it's a bit different in small towns.

Similarly if I'm honest, I've lost interest in people not for being uneducated, but for the combination of being uneducated and unwilling to learn/be curious or talk about anything outside a very narrow list of things. I've seen people try to shut down the conversation when current affairs have come up, for example, and I'm really not interested in pursuing friendships with those people.

hobbies are definitely the route I'd go to meet people, seems a much better selection criteria imo. Good luck gwen

I doubt Steve Jobs was bothered by the fact that he was a college dropout

Very poor example, there are always exceptions that prove the rule!

I would say most of my friends are professionals because they're the people I happen to meet more often and have most in common with but I can't imagine developing a rule for only befriending professionals. Perhaps he grew up feeling out of place and is reacting to it now as an adult. Or maybe he's just noticed that he gets on better with people from a certain culture. Really hard to say without knowing him.

Cara, what does being born here have to do with anything. Babies aren't aware of any of that. Harpy could have been here for decades longer than some adults who were born here.

I'm deleted for calling her out on her xenophobic shit? That's fair

That went odd quickly!

I wouldn't say he's snobby as such, but I kind of see what he means. A friend of mine left school at 16, married a really lovely guy in a very blue collar job mad had 3 DC quickly. She then decided she wanted more of a life and some culture, so left him for an architect and has decided she loves the theatre and ballet, daahling. Go figure.

I think having a DP with a similar background is quite important and I might be massively snobby, but I too think it would be hard to be with someone with little education from the set of Shameless!

I love how some users deliberately misinterpret for their own purposes.

Don't people from "very blue collar" jobs ever like opera and ballet, then?

It's important to be inclusive and open minded in work and in forming acquaintanceships in the community, but there is no need to force yourself to make deep personal relationships you aren't feeling.

I don't think this guy is necessarily faking feeling apart from his family. To have become educated and comfortable in cultured surroundings is completely legit and can make you honestly uncomfortable or bored in other surroundings.

I went to school in a rough area and felt bored and threatened a lot of the time. I didn't speak like everyone else and my family valued education and I looked a bit too clever. I was not treated well because of it, some of the time. There was exclusion and / or bullying. When I was included in things, I was honestly bored by no one ever talking about music, books, films, feelings, anything that I thought was interesting. I realise how wanky it sounds to say "they would not discuss art and literature with me" but that was where my head was and I was honestly not interested in discussing endlessly whether so and so was wearing a padded bra or not, or was really that busty.

Admittedly, that was with a bunch of teenagers and adults can be expected to have more about them.

You will miss out on some very interesting individual people if you make judgements by class or culture, but it is completely legitimate to not be interested in or comfortable in a particular culture more generally. One of my very dearest exes had no education at and was one of the cleverest, funniest and most endlessly interesting person I have ever known. As a couple we could keep each other up till 7am talking, and I loved it, but I was a bit uncomfortable with his family which was culturally so different from mine (although unlike the people I went to school with, they were lovely kind people). In the end, although I was fond of his family, a sense of not really fitting in in each other's worlds was part of what ended our relationship.

Some of my dearest friends are lovely in person, however, can be a total embarrassment in public. So i try not to mix them. Its nothing to do with culture or class, just to avoid a catfight between two queen bees.