Did you marry 'beneath' you?

[paolosgirl]

Or above you? Or is class a thing of a past?

lilibet, nooooooooo! My mother always drummed it into me it was 'loo' and 'napkin' never 'toilet' or (even more ghastly, in her book) 'serviette'.

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technically i married above me...and i have paid for it dearly... my MIL thinks i am from the other side of the tracks,,,,and trailer park trash..and everything else...i had to win the battle between cash flow and pure love....i won,,,,but,...sometimes i think dh resents(?) me..because he chose the wrong thing....
i am anything but what mil thought...3 years college....5 years military...married w/2 children...but dh still sees me as someone else i think...

This is not just a Brit thing. My parenting guru Marge Simpson married beneath her, let us not forget. And she has a great marriage

this is a thread you can only joke about, right? right.

Anyway, dh would say he married beneath him cos I & his ex are both "foreign". his mummy would have wanted him to marry some horse-faced boot from down the lane, i suppose...

I would say i married beneath me cos dh is of Irish origin AND CATHOLIC!

so irish catholics are beneath you are they?

no, sometimes he's on top

Crikey, I didn't think I'd get as many posts on this . It sounds as if most people think along the same lines as I do. Oh - and BTW, the 'beneath' was not meant to be taken too literally.
I think the class thing is not about snobbery (inverted or otherwise), but more about a feeling of security and knowing who you are. That's why I don't think class has anything to do with money, but more about the values you hold.

to change the thread slightly...

how many of you are now a different social class from your own family? I come from a single parent family, coucil estate background, was also raised on free school meals and my first bed was purchased with a social security grant.

Luckily I had a good brain, I managed to get to university and now have a great career and I live in the "posh end" of town with my dh (a doctor). I feel so different from my family, not because of any financial issues (we probably have far greater debt than they do!) but because I can't relate to them. Their lives revolve around watching the telly and getting stuff "off the back of a lorry". I don't judge them for it, I just can't talk about things I have no experience of in my day to day life, and equally, they can't discuss things I'm interested in either.

Most of the family seem to have a huge chip on their shoulder about where I live, what car I drive etc. I tried for a long time to be something I wasn't (spending time with them pretending to be interested in motorbikes, watching copious amounts of TV rather than have a conversation and pretending not to think my uncle's farting and belching was slightly gross), but in the end, they all got the jitters over coming to my wedding (cos they thought it would be "dead posh" and everyone would be judging them)and they said loads of stuff in the heat of the moment that told me how they really felt about me. I stopped pretending to be something I wasn't cos if they think I'm posh anyway, why bother trying not to be?!

They don't speak to me any more because they were upset with the seating arrangements at our wedding. We put them on the largest table because they constituted the largest group, but they think we did it because we were ashamed of them (the table was in the far corner and couldn't be moved)

Anyone else had similar experiences? I think it's so interesting from a sociological viewpoint.

mogmai...yup!!!...grew pretty poor..dad is a junk collector...not really just seemed that way...three pair of pants a year kinda family..dad been married uummm three times..mom left..no electricity some days..., moved out when i was almost 17..now dh...momma's boy..both parents come from pretty well off backgrounds...parents still married...brady bunch..., soooo way different families......our family too all seem to have chips on the shoulder...and now that i am married i tried for quiet some time to be both...but my family too seem unconfortable at my home.....not rich but tidy and clean...nice made up yard..no one was ever really happy for me...soooo we talked about who got arrested that week...so i left one family and the other one pretty much hates me don't fit in either world anymor...funny cause MIL said that dh and i would never make it because we were from two different worlds...

class was never something I was really aware of until I moved to the UK - where I was looked down upon by fellow professionals - university educated etc for being from the 'colonies!!" What the hell?!?!? I tried to politely remind them that this was the new millenium and so on. I had never worked in a school where you called the principal - THe Head or headmaster?!?! We always used each other's first name unless in front of students and then it was Mr/Mrs/Ms whatever.

Neither dh nor I consider we have married an unequal. In terms of quality of character I think dh is a far better soul than I am.

I put that flippant remark in there because bossykate seemed to be spoiling for a row... of course I don't think my dh is beneath me! nor anyone else, for that matter. However, it is true that there was a certain (unspoken but sensed) disappointment in my family that I was to marry a "papist", since we're all staunch CofE on my mother's side and my dad has been both a baptist & a 7th day adventist in his time... It's stupid but bigotry exists.

As a gift to my dh & his parents, as well as a favour to my children (of course), and to let everyone know that I consider Catholicism as good a faith as my own, if not better, both dd & ds were christened Catholics.

So there!

sheesh.

sorry, bossykate. that didn't come out right. I just thought you were being a bit inflamatory, but then who am I to talk?

Ooh. Good thread Paolo's girl!

Mogwai - really interesting. My lifestyle is very similar to parents but dh has done the class transition thing. His Dad was a postman, he had working class upbringing but got to Uni, met me, got job & middle class lifestyle.
It used to worry me that he was working class & me mid class - at first I thought there'd be too many things we couldn't share about our childhood but my Dad pointed out that he did the same thing as my dh. I.e. my Dad was brought up working class, moved away from home, got educated, met middle class girl, married, kids, then middle class lifestyle.
Somehow knowing that our families are just one generation out of sync with each other helped. Not sure if that makes sense.

Sometimes there are things his Mum says that I can't relate too and sometimes he takes the piss out of me but we share the same politics (leftish, greenish, a bit anarcho) so none of it really matters.

Sansouci - How can it be a bit inflammatory to react to the comment that you married beneath you cos you married an Irish catholic. You cant dress it up, you cant unsay it, you cant make it funny(to me) -cos as an Irish catholic I do actually find it deeply insulting! Sorry that this is not what you want to hear and amazed that you thought BK was spoiling for a row! She wrote one sentence and I thought showed great restraint!

quite, flea, thanks for your comment

i think an apology would be better than accusing me of spoiling for a fight, frankly.

Good question. I would never consider dp as 'beneath' me and hope that he would feel the same.

However if we are going on backgrounds/upbringing etc then that makes it complicated!! My Mum's parents were hardworking, both had good jobs, had a big house, nice cars etc, however due to choices that my Mum made she ended up moving to a council estate which is where i then grew up and saw a very different side to life and was generally looked down on by people of my Grandparents 'class'. DP's parents are also hardworking, big house, nice cars etc and dp has done well enough for himself but we do struggle and we don't own a house or anything. I wouldn't think for a second that we were 'different' though because we both came from the same thing and have very much the same ideals and principles.

As an Irish Catholic I didnt take Sansouci's comment as an insult. I saw it as being tongue in cheek. Have to say tho that us Irish are now super cool people and the Celtic tiger is roaring and to be Irish is now the 'in' thing as I was informed last year by a LORD no less who now admits to his Irish heritage. Had to bite my tongue to stop myself telling him that wed rather he didnt.

My West of Scotland Catholic friends joke (fondly, I might add) about the Irish Catholics - and most of them are descended from the Irish when they came over to escape the famine! Is it always inflammatory? Or just in certain contexts?

I think that this thread can be difficult to answer without offending someone at some point. I know that some dp's family thought that I thought that I was stuck-up when I first met them as I was/am very shy and found it difficult to find things to talk to them about and the fact that I knew this made me even more shy and reticent and so compounded the problem. Get on quite well with them now tho.

agree it perhaps isn't helpful to describe someone as "beneath you" for whatever reason, even acknowledging that it's a term you would not use yourself. It's never crossed my mind that one religion would be deemed "beneath" another - you've opened my eyes!!

There's no getting away from the fact that differences exist between different groups, call it class, call it taste, whatever. The problem arises when someone puts value judgements on the differences. I'm sorry to say, in my experience, it's the background I came from (so call working class) that seem to put the most value judgements on the differences. Going back to my wedding, my uncle was convinced my "posh friends" were looking at him and judging him unfavorably because he's a lorry driver. He was missing the point that our friends don't give a stuff - they were there to enjoy our day, and how would they know what he does for a living?

There are some HUGE chips on shoulders out there

THIS THREAD IS 20 YEARS OLD