Judging without judging

On the messiness of making different choices from each other (and talking about the reasons why)

Today I’m struggling with the reality that sometimes when I say “I made a different choice” other people hear “so I think yours is stupid”.

The messiness makes me think, vaguely, of Lauren Oyler’s essay collection No Judgment. Oyler talks about how “no judgment” is a silly thing to say when the truth is we judge each other all the time. It’s like adding “no offense” to not-exactly diffuse an inarguably offensive comment.

But do we really judge each other all the time?

I guess by the Oxford Languages definition, yes. We can’t help but “form an opinion or conclusion about” everyone and everything we interact with. But those opinions aren’t always negative. While I can’t help but judge you, I am very rarely judging you. (Translation: While I can’t help but compile an impression of who you are and how you live, I am very rarely thinking “this person sucks”.)

The “my choices don’t have to be the same as yours” idea first started coming up for me in the dog training world. Scout is a sensitive dog, so I approached her training—and still approach our daily life—differently than many friends with more exuberant companions. On occasion I still find myself in heated discussions (particularly when it comes to methodology nuances like the ethics of punishment… and whether we’re referring to “punishment” in an operant conditioning context or a more colloquial way, which is a whole other essay) but most of the time I think I’ve got the nerdy open-minded dog owner thing down. If you are happy, and your dog is happy, and your choices don’t hurt anyone else? Heck yes! (Listen: You can hear me cheering for you all the way from south Florida.) And it takes a lot to make me second guess the way Scout and I live now, while a few years ago it took literally nothing.

But diversity of thought and experience is increasingly relevant in other areas of my life—areas I’ve spent less time sitting with and hold more insecurity about. Sean and I have become quite “nontraditional”. We’ve lived in a van for more than two years; we don’t want to have kids; we’re married, but I didn’t take his last name; our wedding ceremony was led by a friend and took place on a crowded afternoon beach; we don’t work full-time 9-5 schedules; I don’t use shampoo or facial cleanser anymore; we have very few material belongings; we don’t celebrate most holidays or exchange gifts; I could probably go on but even this list is enough to make me worried I’m ostracizing you.

Some of these nontraditional choices are things we feel strongly about. We have spent ages talking about children, for example, and took intentional steps to not become parents. Others happened sort of on accident. There is no big logical reason giving each other holiday gifts hasn’t become a lasting part of our relationship.

But all of them can be hard to talk about. And no matter how much I assert—how much I believe—that we do not have to be the same to be supportive and kind and connected, I still sometimes feel scared diving into the ways my choices might differ from yours. What if I offend you? What if you think I am unreasonable?

What if a misunderstanding stunts what could have otherwise been a great friendship?

On the one hand, I enjoy feeling “different”. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise—when Joy Sullivan wrote that as an ex-Evangelical she finds herself turned on by other people’s judgment, I nodded so hard my neck twinged. Sean and I love being the “weird” aunt and uncle figures. (I have been working on a separate essay about what it means to be different for about a year now, trying to unspool my complicated emotions about “specialness”.)

On the other hand, I want desperately to fit in. I only need a few fingers for the number of places—physical and situational—I’ve felt I truly belong, and on a bad day I don’t think I fit even in those. Doing things differently from other people I admire can heighten this anxiety because so often we bond over shared ideas and habits and beliefs (even if they seem “little”). What if you throw me out because you are obsessed with skincare and I eschew most forms of it? What if you believe I am judging you for changing your last name because I vehemently kept mine? (I’m not, I swear!) What if being a loving, badass parent is so core to your identity that you’re subconsciously hurt I don’t want the same thing?

Let me be honest: I struggle turning those questions around on myself. I think, tentatively, I am good at accepting the people I love. But one of the reasons I worry about how other folks receive me is because I worry about how I receive them—at least in private. Am I properly imagining their lives and situations? I mean, probably not, right? That sort of clarity seems downright impossible, so the poisonous voice in my head declares that we must all be falling short and that trying to stretch is too frightening, too unlikely, to be worthwhile.

I want to be unapologetically myself. (“Just be you!” boasted a hand-painted sign in a coffee shop this morning, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. I won’t get into the confounding variables about who “we” even are, at our cores.) But I also want to be liked. I want to be “different” enough to be interesting but not so different we don’t have a strong basis for connection. In short: I don’t want to piss anybody off. I don’t want to get pissed off.

And that is a problem.

Wanting to embrace nuance and focus on the things that unite us is lovely, but asking for—and so freely offering—idiot compassion is not. It’s okay to have a point of view. It’s okay to express that point of view. It’s okay to trust in the strength of my real, honest relationships—and to bet on new ones, too, give all these bonds the chance to handle division.