Mr. Judgy Pants

By Amethyst

One of my profiles (which happens to not be a kink site) lists a few quotes from some of my favorite fandoms and encourages messages from people who can identify those quotes. I got a message from a guy who identified three or four out of six quotes, claimed he read my whole profile and was intrigued, and asked for a message back.

I check out his profile. I am thoroughly confused. He is Judgy Judgerson McJudgetown. He is disdainfully and disparagingly anti-kink, anti-bisexuality, anti-poly, and pretty much anti-everything in my life – which is displayed all over my profile. I cannot imagine what in my profile attracted him or who he has mistaken me for. We couldn’t be less suited for each other if lives were at stake.

I know this should be the end of the story. I know that the next sentence should read, “And then I deleted his message and never thought about Judgington O’Judgely ever again. The End.” But,

I’d promised myself I would respond to all polite messages – a policy I have since re-thought. In a move to be filed under “No good can come of this,” I answered and explained that we would not be communicating further because he was judgetastic. The Judgimator responded to me, berating me for my ideals and opinions. Furthermore, Judge Jefferson went on to explain that no one asked what I thought, because he doesn’t value the opinions of “an ignorant whore who sleeps with anything that moves.” I can only conclude that he must be immobile.

I struggled to find a lesson learned here. I came up with two things. 1) Judge-a-matron 3000 reminded me how easy (and usually pointless) it is to judge people. 2) The experience illustrated how important it is not to assign too much value to the opinions of random people on the internet.

There’s an inherent amount of judging that happens on dating sites of any kind. When we put profiles up, we do open ourselves to judgment. And when we read other people’s profiles, we judge, at the very least, their potential fitness as a match for us. But when that necessary evaluation spills over into wholesale conclusions about a person’s entire life, we need to take a step back. We can take neither ourselves nor the universe of potential partners too seriously. If we decide to dismiss a particular person, it’s probably not necessary to provide them with a catalog of our reasons – and certainly not rudely. Similarly, if we are rejected by someone, healthy self-esteem will hopefully have us recognize it for what it is: a mismatch with one person. In most cases, a person’s suitability (or lack thereof) is fairly independent of that person’s overall quality as a human being. It’s true for me, you, that person who’s profile you just read, and pretty much everyone out there. Except Mr. Judgy Pants. He was an idiot.