On Tuesday, Daily Illini columnist Bridget Sharkey delivered a shocking announcement to the Champaign-Urbana community. She is expecting a child in October, and I’m what you might call the “baby’s daddy.”

This is quite a remarkable feat, when you think about it. For one, Bridget and I have never physically met, which made impregnating her a fairly difficult task. To make matters worse, I’m not attracted to the opposite sex, and Ms. Sharkey prefers to go the natural route. Who would have thought we’d beat those odds?

Perhaps the weirdest thing about this whole arrangement is that Bridget was once my ideological foe. Last year, she wrote a column about the gay marriage debate that made me quite angry. In the time that followed, I declared myself anti-Bridget. When I became an opinions columnist last semester, I made it a point to give her the occasional steely glare at staff meetings. (Note: It was basically the same tough guy look you see in the awkward mugshot above.)

You see, I have a problem. Like many people, I sometimes get caught up in unnecessary grudges that are based on one bad experience. For far too long, I held a grudge against Ms. Sharkey. My negative opinion of her was based entirely on one unhappy reaction to a column, but I just couldn’t move past it. It’s not like I thought about her day and night, but reminders of her presence would often trigger my annoyance.

Then something happened that ended my longstanding unhappiness with Bridget. This semester, she wrote a column that was more or less an apology for the same column that had made me dislike her in the first place. In this apology, Sharkey admitted to having been raised to feel the way she did about issues such as homosexuality, but she had begun to realize it was time to think for herself. As it turns out, forming her own views led her to become more open-minded as a person. Consequently, she wanted to apologize for any hard feelings she might have caused in her original column.

When I read this apology, it made me happy, but it also made me feel quite stupid. It could have been months before writing this apology that Bridget had become a more open-minded individual, yet I had been holding a grudge this entire time. At no point did I entertain the thought that people can change or that it might be unfair to condemn someone because of a single incident. I just let my initial reaction be the basis for all future judgments of Bridget as a person. Even when one of her later columns would make me smile, I’d follow up by saying, “Oh, it’s too bad she annoyed me that one time.”

It’s so easy for us to hold long-lasting grudges against people without really thinking about it. The hard part is stopping ourselves for a moment and realizing that our snap judgments could be doing more harm than good. It took an apology from Sharkey for me to realize that my grudge was a big waste of time, and this concerns me.

We are always going to be upset by things that people say or do, and most of these individuals won’t be printing a full-blown retraction for those comments or actions. If we decide to get caught up in grudges with everyone who we feel has “wronged” us, we will be paying the bigger price. Not only will we then be letting petty aggravations dominate our thoughts, but we might also be dismissing potential friends as foes because of something that isn’t that important in the long run.

In my case, if I would have refused to let go of my grudge with Bridget, I would be missing out on the funny AIM conversations and theface book.com friendship status we now share. Not to mention the fact that she is currently carrying my child. Let the highly anticipated arrival of our baby be proof that letting go of snap judgments can truly be rewarding.