Have you had a Sliding Doors moment in your life?

[slidingdoorsmoments]

Sliding Doors is quite an old film now, but I think most people know what this phrase means. For those that don't know the film, a woman comes home early, to find her partner with another woman. This is the catalyst for her to leave him, and live alternative life with someone else. A life that would never existed, had she not discovered her Partner cheating.

I think I've had a few of these moments in my life. The biggest ones being :

My friend telling me that my husband was cheating on me : I left him and now I am married to someone else.

Me sitting down one night, with a glass of wine, and looking at houses on Right Move, that were by the sea : saw a house, loved it, showed DH, viewed it the next day (only 40 mins away) and bought it. Had no intentions of moving until we saw the house. Now been here 11 years and still in love with it. Made lots of friends here and it's a lovely little town.

I'm sure life is filled with lots of mini sliding doors moments, but these two really stand out for me as big ones, because if my friend had never had the courage to tell me that my first H was cheating, I would never have left him, and I would never have met my lovely DH. And, if I hadn't been idly scrolling on Right Move that night, we would probably still be living at our old house.

Not an AIBU, posted here for traffic.

Yea this is the one from the other week.... good read

These aren't sliding doors moments though are they? I thought it was when one random happening infiuenced something else usually bigger.

Yes. My teenage on/off crush asked me home with him in a pub in 2002. I said no, and I know now that he was in his ready to settle down era. He met his now wife a month later (after asking her home, from a club 😂).

For ages I regretted not saying yes as we had potential - but now I am VERY pleased I didn’t and thank my 21 year old self for her guidance!!!

Who made you the queen of sliding door definitions….

Nobody, i was trying to answer Op and failed.. I said I "thought" as I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong. Nowhere did i claim to be the queen of definitions! 😂

As a foster carer, I made a phone call about someone I was concerned about (with their permission), to social services. After speaking about that issue, the sw asked whether I could take a baby which had just been born. She had been about to to phone someone else, but said if I could take the baby as an emergency, it would save her a job.

Twenty four years later, that ‘baby’ is still with us, and is our beloved child.

Exactly!! 1,000,000 threads on ‘I’m in a sexless marriage’ ‘should I report this GP/Teacher/HV?’ Child free weddings, splitting bills when the OP only had a lettuce leaf and a glass of water, worried about DH and his female colleague….they've ALL been done to death! There is nothing new under the sun on MN!!!

Not sure if it counts, but...met my OH when we both gatecrashed the same all-day barbecue, through entirely different sets of barely-acquaintances under totally odd circumstances. We made at least 10 different completely random and highly unlikely out-of-character choices between us on the same day that led to us both being there at the same time and actually talking, and neither of us can convincingly explain why we made any of them.

25 years later, still together. If either of us had made a single more in-character choice that day, both of our lives would've been wildly different.

I think that's the butterfly effect.

I agree with the pps saying that life is an endless series of sliding doors moments, and some of them are bound to be much more significant than others. I have some pretty major regrets about my life but I'd be reluctant to go back and take a different path because then I might not have the husband, child, and friends I have now, and that thought terrifies me. Of course I might have had equally good people in my life if I'd done things differently, and I'm sure I've missed out on some amazing experiences and people due to my choices, but I don't really care!

Thanks for these. Yes, I was meaning the really big things, especially if making a decision that changed the direction of your life, or like missing a plane and meeting your DH on the next one. Things that are so random, and a chance moment, that changes everything forever.

I was watching a documentary the other day about 9/11, and one of the workers didn't go in that day because his wife went into labour. That saved his life. That baby is an adult now, and was saying how him being born on that exact day meant that he had a father.

Actually, if you like thinking about this kind of thing, I highly recommend a series called Dark Matter. It is about a man called Jason, who exists in multiple parallel universes, all different based on his sliding door moments. It's excellent.

Well I enjoyed reading this thread, even if there were two other similar ones. Geez! Do people think that every poster sees every thread! If a thread title is boring, don't click on it!

I don't know if this counts but when I got the sack from a job many years ago in my early 20s, a colleague ended up with twice the work. I was on a tube platform wondering who i'd get to fill the other room in house share when I saw him ten feet away! he'd walked out of the job because he had twice the work and he'd taken a job in London. So he ended up in the other room. Years later I relocated back to my home town (before him) and then a few months later I saw him at the station in my home town. So it was weird, more like is that you on the train platform, of course it is

I love that kind of thing.

Life is absolutely full of these but the one that stands out is a decision my former employer took to interview me about 10 years ago. I was running late already for the interview and then went to the wrong office, like an idiot. She told me that she was very close to rejecting me but decided to give me the benefit of the doubt when I finally got to the right office.

If she hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have moved to the city I currently live in, wouldn’t have met DH, wouldn’t have DD, it really would all have been different.

They've made a TV series of it now too, it's on AppleTV.

Mid 20s, young happy and stupid, out partying with my friends, we were all in the back of the car (3 of us), music on loud, laughing, shouting, messing about, we'd been drinking, the driver was going too fast, only the passenger in the front seat who has been turning round to speak to us for ages happened to look forward a split second before the driver, who hadn't been concentrating, would've hit a wall and swerved the wheel...noone was hurt. Luck doesn't even begin to cover it. I don't think the driver had been drinking as it's unlikely wed have gotten in the car, I can't remember, but I often remember that and think how bloody lucky I am. Big sliding doors moment!
.
Have a couple of others but they're too outing!

I was offered two jobs and essentially chose one on the flip of a coin. I am now with and have two DCs with someone from the team I joined.

Many years ago I was moving overseas to work with my then boyfriend. We hadn’t been getting on well, and I thought maybe we just needed a change of scene. Due to fly out in the new year. Spent Christmas with my parents and an old on off boyfriend called me and asked me out for a drink on Boxing Day. I went, it was amazing and as if we had never been apart. I always thought I would end up with him. If he had asked me not to go abroad and to stay with him, I would have done so in a heartbeat. He didn’t. I went overseas with my boyfriend, we split up after a few months. I then met my husband, whom I’ve been married to for over 20 years. Never heard from the on/off boyfriend again.

I bet you're fun at parties....

Only in that I got my hair all cut off like GP does in the film. Unfortunately, I ended up looking more like David Beckham that Gwynnie!

Doesn't matter as you're unlikely to be at the same parties...

I love these types of threads. Different people use mumsnet at different points in time so you get different responses. I like that you have asked the question again

A big Sliding Doors moment for A level students would be their university choice. Depending on how well they do in their exams, they will have got either their 1st, 2nd or 3rd university choice. That massively impacts on who you meet, who your long term partner will be, who your housemates will be etc.

I ended up with my 2nd university choice and I sometimes think what course my life would have taken if I got my 1st choice.

Got offered 2 funded places to do my MSc. Course Uni A because it had been sunny when