To ask what was your 'sliding doors' moment?

[Fairyicecream]

For those that haven't seen the film Sliding Doors, it basically showed how different her life turned out if she caught the train/didn't catch the train.

What was one decision, one moment that could have changed your whole life?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. A few years ago my marriage went through a bad patch (understatement to say the least). DH talked about leaving. It was the worst time of my life and I honestly don't know how I got through it.

Anyway, i often wonder, what if I had just told him to go? We would now all be living separately and we and our beautiful DC would have a completely different life.

Instead, we are all now happier than we have ever been. But it could have all been so different with that one decision...

My mother got to the airport early, charmed her way into an earlier flight.

The flight she was originally meant to be on crashed, multiple fatalities, from the section of the plane that she would have been sitting in.

@Oliversmumsarmy- it was like that with my husband; there are loads of incidences of us just missing each other. Too tedious to recount here, but it is quite uncanny.

Living with a bone idle, couldn't last a job for longer than a week, pot smoking idiot ex. On being fed up because I paid all the bills and needed extra money (I know I was love blind and very young) anyhow I picked up the local paper and looked at the job adverts. First one was working in a localish pub. Went to the phone box (No mobiles back then 😂), called the number and was asked to come for an interview asap - controlling ex in toe 🙄. Anyhow got the job, loved it and the owners son was same age and I fell in love at first sight. Ex ditched meanwhile as complete no hoper and incompetent, paranoid massive twat. After many, many months of working in the pub and building up my confidence again slowly I took a massive chance and paid the gorgeous son a visit out of the blue. We have been together over 25 years and have 3 gorgeous children. We have had many good but equally many, many low times - had a 3 month separation during lockdown whilst at my lowest mentally and I moved out. I have never felt so confused, unloved and low. After 15 years of being numbed on antidepressants which started from PND I stopped them and went cold turkey. I then took a bold decision and asked my partner for a date. Safe to say thank god (slightly) for lockdown no. 2. As moved back in quicker than expected , we are getting there, sex life amazing again. I fricking love him so much and the kids I never want to be apart from them again. So many ifs, buts and decisions but I now know I need this man in my life forever.

I didn't want to meet up with a man I'd been chatting with because a) it was Friday 13th and b) I'd had a stalker, a public dumper and someone who told me "he had enough friends than you". Oh and one whose mum was more important than me.
But I did and we had Thai food and met some mutual friends and 18 years later we have 2 DCs.

@thetaleunfolds
@Chickychickydodah

for both of you

Instead of walking my usual route down Kensington Palace Gardens to Ken High Street I headed down the parallel road of Kensington church street as at the last moment I decided to visit a shop. Just as I was stepping through the door of the shop a car bomb exploded outside the Israeli embassy exactly at the spot I would have been if I had not deviated. Still got caught in the blast though as all the shop windows got blown in around me. All a bit weird.

Nothing as dramatic as some of these but I do often wonder "what if" about a moment when I was 19. I'd just met my now DH & was aware he liked me but was trying to decide how I felt. My best friend told me he'd cry if I went out with DH. To my eternal shame, I laughed - I couldn't imagine why he'd even care who I went out with. I'd adored him for 3 years & he'd spent most of that time dating someone else so I assumed he wasn't interested. It was only after discussing it with a mutual friend that I found out he was but he shut me down every time I asked him why he said he'd cry.

Obviously, I did end up going out with DH & we have a happy, stable life. My old friend is also married with kids &, from what I hear on the grapevine, also has a happy, stable life. I genuinely think I could've been happy with either of them but if I'd reacted different that night it could've changed the entire direction of my life!

I accidentally found out something about my ex (won't go into details, but a bit like stumbling across something written in a notebook in a box I never looked in, because some weird instinct made me look there). It was enough to lead to a divorce. Years later I have the most peaceful and happy life with my children. But I often wonder about what might have happened had I not made my discovery. I'm pretty certain I would have completely lost myself in my miserable marriage and become a shell of myself. I always think I had a guardian angel nudging me that day, even though it didn't feel like it at the time.

30 years ago I lost my virginity at 15 () to the most beautiful boy I'd ever known, I went on holiday and my wicked 'best' friend was going out with him when I got back. She was a particularly cruel person and neither of us had the balls to say anything to her. (They were together 2 years and he was 14 when I met him)
He and I stayed in touch for all these years, married, kids etc. But haven't been in touch at all for about 3 years but I knew his marriage had ended.
My relationship broke down irretrievably at the start of the the year after years of me telling him to please just leave. Due to covid we were (and are for the next couple of weeks) still in the same house.
The night that my soon to be ex finally admitted defeat and said he would go I got a message from the guy!!! Just saying hi, nothing else, I chose to answer that message that night and we had our (second) first date 30 years exactly from losing my virginity to him. I have never been as happy as I am now. He doesn't know what made him message me apart from the fact he thought about me a lot, and I don't know why I chose to message him back. I'm head over heels in love, again.

@BluebellsareBlue awww! ❤️

Going to a university open day on a whim when I was getting fed up of being rejected for various minimum-wage jobs. I was in my late twenties and had been thoroughly convinced since age 13 that university was only for those who were a) posher and b) less anxious than I was. I'd been a school-refusing teenager who just did not fit well in the system. On the day I ended up having a conversation with a lecturer and it was just amazing. Someone who actually cared about ideas and wanted to discuss them.

I'm now a PhD candidate.

At my first job I messed up majorly one day by accidentally missing a customer off my to-call list, which meant I inadvertently let their account get temporarily suspended. This customer was very rich, very powerful and very pissed off and basically put pressure on my supervisors to fire me for an honest mistake. He succeeded.

But if I hadn’t have missed that one particular customer off my list...

I would never have been asked by my aunt to volunteer at her work in order to gain some more work experience and get my confidence back. Therefore I would not have received a full time job at this company (which is where I gained the experience for my current dream job). Which meant that I wouldn’t have met my DH 3 months later when his department joined with my department from another location. Which meant we would never have gotten together and move to his home town. Which meant I would never have found my current dream job. Which meant I would never have had the funds to help buy our beautiful house, which without having secured meant I would’t have had been in a financial position to have had our beautiful babies.

At the time of the dismissal I was almost suicidal (I contacted Samaritans for support) and was at my lowest. Yet in hindsight it was the best thing that ever happened to me (including the fact that I got to leave a job that I hated (including it’s very toxic work environment) with almost zero repercussions to my professional reputation.

I do believe in fate 🙂

Does anyone when something significant happens find the world slowing down around you and the world becoming silent.

Don’t know if I am nuts but even at what seem to be insignificant moments I always get this “feeling” and then later I look back and it is almost like a turning point in my life that started at that moment.

I went to a friends wedding who I’d not seen for about 10 years (school friend). I was almost certain I didn’t want to go as I was meant to be going with my boyfriend who’d broken up with me a week before. But decided as she’d already have paid for meals etc I’d go and ask to take my sister instead of partner so as not to waste (bride was happy with this). Ended up sat next to one of the groomsmen for dinner. Anyway 4 and a half years later were engaged, own a house together & have an 18 month old. I often think what my life would be if I’d have just not gone, and I thank my lucky stars everyday that I decided to go.

If I hadn’t have caught my ex cheating three weeks before my wedding, and dumped him, cancelled a huge wedding, etc then I’d never have got myself out of deep depression, met the love of my life, moved house, jobs, life, married and had 2 perfect kids. Phew!

If I'd have gone to uni at 18 instead of working first and going at 21, I'd never have met my now husband.
He also changed his course very last minute onto mine or we'd still not have met

I'm comfort-watching Sliding Doors on Prime Video now, and it's just struck me that the key moment is not so much catching the train, but catching it because a parent stopped his young daughter bouncing her Barbie on the tube station handrail Gwyneth Paltrow was using, which means she isn't delayed by that half second having to walk round the little girl.

The moral of the story is actually "Control your kids" . How very Mumsnet!

Mixedupworld
Sorry spelt your name wrong, MF stands for mother fuc*er and he ended up having 5 affairs before split from sister was permanent. 5 affairs 3 nervous breakdowns, 2 lovely children and twenty years of hell.

When I left school, I had a job which started out fine for the first year, then a bully of a manager came along and made my life hell. 6 months in I decided to apply to go to univ as the thought of staying just wasn't an option. Happily left having been there for 2 years and my life totally changed, all thanks to the awful manager forcing my hand.

If I hadn't been accosted when i was walking by myself on an isolated canal path (it was a Sunday afternoon so should have been OK) I would never have joined a walking group and never met dh.

Similar to another P above - choice of uni and again, Liverpool. Could have been Leeds or Manchester. Great cities, but so glad I went to Liverpool. Got my job through contacts from uni, met DH, still here many years later - in my (adopted) Liverpool home, as the song says.

Similar to a pp, I swapped work shifts for the day of the 7 July Kings Cross tube bomb. There's no way of knowing which tube I would have been on, but I would have been travelling on that line, passing Kings Cross about that time and so potentially on an impacted train.

The swap meant I was on an earlier tube and had already arrived at work when the bombs were detonated.

The thing about all these SD moments, is that you never know what might have happened otherwise.

I went for a drink after work at the end of term; nearly turned it down because I was so knackered, but decided to stay a short while for politeness.
Another group came into the pub; group of hospital workers. One of them spotted me; she'd never been there before, one of her workmates had suggested the venue. We'd known one another before I moved away from home, and she was trying to organise a reunion, but had no contact details for me.
At the reunion, I met up with many old friends, and rekindled a very happy relationship. As I said later, if you read that sort of thing in a novel, you'd think it was a bit cheesy and contrived.

Well of course you don't, but it's still fun to speculate!

The real sliding doors moments you'd have no idea about really, would you?