Dating in the Time of Trump
Is it only for the like-minded?
WITH heated political interactions now the norm, both on social media and in the real world, is dating someone with different political beliefs a thing of the past?
It sure would seem that way. Jenny, 26, from New Orleans, was outspoken against President Trump. She says she wouldn’t date a Trump supporter, because there would be “fundamental differences in the values we hold most important.” If she were in the middle of a good first date and found out the guy was a Trump fan, she’d “try and finish the evening like nothing was wrong — but definitely wouldn’t make concrete plans for a second date.”
Not everyone manages to hold it together as well. Peter, 41, in Midtown East has gotten dramatic reactions from dates when he mentions he’s a Trump supporter. “One stormed out,” he said. Another “just shut down and stared into space.” He describes sitting next to women who are drinking $30 glasses of wine and talking about their upcoming Vermont ski trips — while also discussing their fear that America has become Nazi Germany.
Trump supporters who are unattached have established their own online enclaves where they can meet like-minded people to avoid outbursts like the kind Peter describes. A Web site called Trump Singles promises to “make dating great again.” It claims about 30,000 members, with a spike in enrollment since the election.
Sadly, sites like that seem almost unnecessary, since many people would be hard-pressed to even find someone in their social circle with differing political opinions.
A Pew Research Center study from last June found that nearly half (47 percent) of people who at the time intended to vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump had no close friends who backed Trump, while nearly a third (31 percent) of Trump voters had no close Clinton supporters as friends.
But is the strife all Trump-related? Or have we been divided according to politics all along?
A study out of Yale and Stanford last month in the Journal of Politics found that these days we seek out partners with similar political beliefs far more than in the past. We judge potential partners far more positively when we share politics.
One of the study’s authors, Neil Malhotra, predicts love will remain a battlefield for those politically opposed. Malhotra tells me in an email, “I think we are going to see more segregated dating because people are increasingly equating political positions with core values (which are important for marriage and raising children).
“People no longer view the other side as the loyal opposition, but increasingly as fundamentally immoral.”
Stan, 38, in South Brooklyn, says the dynamic is more pronounced than ever. He remembers some of his dates during the George W. Bush years behaving as if “the sky is falling” when they learned he’s a Republican — but he says now it’s as if the sky has actually fallen: Even though he doesn’t call himself a “Trump supporter,” he gets pushback from women because, as he describes it, “you are a Nazi unless you reflexively foam at the mouth at everything [Trump] does.”
Amelia in Michigan notes that staying quiet on a date is also not an option. “Dating in this over-politicized time is awful. More people want to talk about politics than before, and they tend to think it’s fishy if you want to steer the conversation away from it.” She says she’s unlikely to date liberals because she finds them intolerant of outside viewpoints, though she’s open to the possibility.
Bipartisan love does still, of course, exist. Political consultants Mary Matalin and James Carville are still going strong despite their ties to opposite parties (although Matalin did recently say that if Carville changed his affiliation it would “contribute mightily to marital tranquility”).
Republican commentator Margaret Hoover is married to independent John Avlon, editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast. “Laughter is the only way through the disagreements,” Hoover tells me. “Some mix of the creative and absurd jokes to point out our mutual intransigence helps us plod our way through different perspectives in this moment in history.”
Political-based dating is unfortunate. It denies us the fun that comes from dating outside our comfort zone. Intellectually curious daters should look forward to being challenged. Indeed, ideological diversity can be sexy.
And there’s one other thing. If you only date someone who shares your political beliefs, you’ll miss out on one of the very best parts of relationships: the satisfaction of changing a partner’s mind.