Kind of a blanket statement, that title, isn’t it? This came up as a conversation between myself and The Wife. A conversation that She greatly disagreed with me about.
The problem is that when I say something like “I don’t like people who don’t drink,” I don’t mean it to be a binary like/dislike. This was probably the root of disagreement between Her and myself. I determine the likability of a person by ranking certain factors about them. Each factor having a certain weight to it – not all are equal. For example, if someone doesn’t drink, I rank them negatively. However, not as negative as I’d rank someone for, say, killing dogs with their bare hands1.
The same goes for the positive side of likability. If a person doesn’t drink, but is otherwise a nice person to be around, then I’d probably overall rank them as a positively likable person.
I think everyone does this to one degree or another. They take certain personality characteristics/actions of a person and weigh them against each other to form a like/dislike of the person. The issue is that people choose different things about different people as well as the fact that no two people choose the same things and same weights for those factors. I may dislike the fact that an adult will say ‘Shoot’ or ‘Dang’ when in conversation with another adult, but someone else might not even care2.
She called me judgmental. I agree, I am, but my point is that everyone is. I may just vocalize that more than others. Everyone judges other people and there is nothing wrong with that. People should just realize that each person has their own criteria for their judgments and I’m not sure you could compare two differing judgments of a person and say one is right and one is wrong. It’s just an opinion.
- Michael Vick, I’m looking at you here.
- I should take the word may out of this sentence, it’s true that I dislike people who do this.