It’s never very hard to notice when people are defensive about the choices they have made concerning the way they live their lives. They overreact, usually in an angry and hostile manner, and more often than not, in response to their own actions.
You can usually judge whether or not a lifestyle choice is wrong by how angry.and defensive its practitioners become when you say that they’re making a bad choice.
Here’s an example, and it wasn’t even a judgment, but an assumption I’d made on Facebook about a couple with a child not being the parents because they weren’t wearing wedding rings.
So I figured the woman was the parent and the guy was a boyfriend.
Some woman I went to high school with went totally berserk in my comments. How dare I make that assumption! Oh, I must think I’m perfect! What a judgmental asshole! You don’t have to be married to raise a child you both created!
On and on, stalking every post Id made that month alerting everyone to what an asshole bigot I am up on my high horse.
I just laughed and deleted it all, didn’t even respond. She was living with some guy she’d had a kid with and I think he had kids from another woman. I guess I hit a sore spot.
But if she was comfortable with her choices, my simple generalization wouldn’t have made her raging mad. At most she would’ve felt a little annoyed.
People often think the anger comes from others judging them, but it’s not that they’re being judged. It’s that deep down they KNOW they’ve made the wrong choice. That’s why the real or perceived judgment stings.
Spacebunny has noticed this, particularly with regards to parents who don’t homeschool their children. They know the option is suboptimal for their children, and when it isn’t a matter of necessity, the mere fact of someone else making a different choice makes them proactively defensive:
This is one hundred percent true.
Another example is homeschooling – when I started homeschooling I would get asked why I chose that path – honesty would get them immediately defensive of their choice and then, instead of listening to me, they would start telling why they would/could never do it and blah, blah, blah. To which I generally responded “I don’t care, I didn’t ask you, you asked me.”