Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
A HOUSE DIVIDED
SPOUSES SOMETIMES FIND THEMSELVES ON OPPOSITE SIDES POLITICALLY
R.and J. have been married for 45 years and agree on, if not everything, at least most things. Except — and this is a biggie — politics. When it comes to politics, R. said, “we have a pretty strict rule: We don’t talk about it.”
R, 65 (who asked that the couple’s names not be used in this story) describes herself as a liberal Democrat and her husband, 67, as a staunch and longtime Republican. Over the years, “we’ve had some ferocious arguments,” she said, “and we usually end up patching things up because we decide we really cannot talk about it. We get too disrespectful and too mean.”
Members of bipolitical marriages — and even of multipolitical families — always walk on shaky ground, lest disagreements about politics stretch and snap familial bonds like a disintegrating rubber band left over from the Carter administration.
And this year’s presidential election campaign, which pits Democrat
Hillary Clinton against Republican Donald Trump against a backdrop of enmity usually reserved for civil wars and college football, probably isn’t helping.
“I know many couples where one person is voting for one and one is voting for another,” said Ron Lawrence, founder and clinical supervisor of Community Counseling Center of Southern Nevada.
Luckily, Lawrence hasn’t — at least hasn’t yet — heard of intramarriage political differences causing divorce or serious stresses in marriages. However, Michelle Paul, an associate faculty member in the psychology department at UNLV, has heard what she calls anecdotal evidence that political disagreements are causing lesser-grade stresses in some relationships.
“I’ve heard through acquaintances that (people say), ‘I can’t believe my spouse is voting for’ fill-inthe-blank, and we’re going to have a conversation about that’” she said.
Sondra Cosgrove, a history professor at the College of Southern Nevada, has seen spouses’ intramarital political disputes spill over onto social media.
“I see it on Facebook, where it’s the (wife) posting something other than what the man has posted, and the wife posting an argument with him there on Facebook,” she said.
Both research and realworld experience indicate that most of us marry people whose political views align with our own. For example, the website FiveThirtyEight. com in June reported a study that said 30 percent of married households “contain a mismatched partisan pair,” with about one-third of those Democrat-Republican marriages and the rest independents married to Democrats or Republicans.
And there may be no way of knowing for sure how many friendships might chill during this year’s campaign season. “I have friends on both sides that aren’t ever going to talk to each other,” Cosgrove said.
Donna Wilburn, a Las Vegas licensed marriage and family therapist, suspects that social media may be intensifying an already tense debate by helping to “generate so much emotion that it’s got people in a tizzy. People who never talk about politics at all are having a hard time not talking about politics.” Even in session. “People are talking to me and saying, ‘I hope you’re not voting for Trump’” Wilburn said. “I’m like, ‘This is not what we’re supposed to be talking about.’ These are people I’ve been working with for years, and now it’s coming up? Now they want to ask me about my political orientation?”
Paul said the dynamics of political disagreements are similar to the dynamics of marital disagreements of any other sort. Still, it can be jarring for a spouse to discover one day that the other’s political views are so contrary to what he or she believes.
Early in a relationship, “we’re sort of in the sunny, sunshine phase, the idealized romance phase, and we present ourselves as our best selves, and we tend to view the other through the lens of that sunny phase,” Paul said.
Then, as a relationship matures, “maybe issues that didn’t seem to matter so much in a relationship will start to,” Paul said. “That can happen with religious views, whether or not you want children or how you handle finances.
“I don’t necessarily see politics as being any different. It happens to be in our face right now, but I think it would be a common thing to happen in a relationship as couples get to know each other and, maybe, realize that you don’t really completely juxtapose, that you’re not me and we’re not 100 percent overlapping.”
Holding different political views doesn’t have to be a relationship-breaker. R. said her and her husband’s strategy of avoiding political discussion is one that took getting used to.
“We are very opinionated people, and we feel strongly about our views, and it is incredibly hard not to say anything,” she said. But “we say, ‘OK, look, our marriage is important and we cannot screw it up with this kind of discussion. We have to respect each other’s opinion and agree to disagree.’”
Paul said a good first step for politically warring couples is “letting go of ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’”
Instead, try to understand why a politically contrary spouse believes what he or she does, “preparing to say to the other person, ‘Tell me more about why you like Hillary Clinton. What is it about her that resonates with you and vice versa: ‘What is it in your experience that she speaks to?’
“Try to find a place of, ‘You know, if she spoke to me in the same way and I resonated with those things, I could see where you’re coming from that you choose Hillary Clinton’ or Donald Trump.”
Look for common ground, Lawrence said. “A couple may say, ‘Oh, I believe that children should have everything they want or need to grow up in the world.’ Well, you’re going to find there’s probably no difference in that belief between Democrats and Republicans, so that’s the common ground.”
Focus on aspects of the relationship that don’t involve politics. Lawrence recalled one couple who were having disagreements in their marriages.
“I said, ‘When and where was your last vacation?’ They said, ‘Last year, it was Montreal, and we had the time of our lives.’ I said to the husband and wife, ‘Do you get it?’ They looked at me and said, ‘We get it.’ ”
It’s possible that the particularly stark differences between Clinton and Trump may ratchet up intramarital political tensions this year.
“In the past, I could see women go, ‘Well, George W. (Bush), I can vote for him,’” Cosgrove said, while this year’s chasmlike differences between the two candidates can make compromise difficult.
“But I also see it with Bernie (Sanders) and Clinton people,” Cosgrove said, “where the woman is saying, ‘OK, look, you can like Bernie, but he’s not going to be the candidate, so just shut up and support (Clinton).’ ”
R. and J. have found the opposite to be true. Republican J. “doesn’t like Trump at all,” R. says and even is talking about not voting for anybody in November.
“And I, at some point, am going to have to break it to him that to abstain is to vote for Trump,” R. said. “That’s the scary part.”
“I’ve heard through acquaintances that (people say), ‘I can’t believe my spouse is voting for’ fill-in-the-blank, and we’re going to have a conversation about that.’ ” MICHELLE PAUL UNLV ASSOCIATE FACULTY MEMBER IN PSYCHOLOGY