dating and politics
on filters and litmus tests
The date was perfectly fine: two rounds of drinks, conversation that moved, shared stories of writing and difficult editors and an alert that Kim and Kanye were breaking up just as the mandatory order of olives arrived. The fact that it was cold and we were sitting outside meant that we couldn’t linger, but also that heading home early didn’t feel overly damning. We made plans to go out again.
The next day she texted me and asked to chat on the phone. While she had a good time, she explained, she had spent the evening perusing some of my writing and wanted to ask me about a few pieces and tweets that she found “concerning.” None of these were incendiary or provocative, but they indicated certain “incompatibilities.” She was ready with exact quotations and impressive references: she had clearly read me closely and with care. She was specific enough to cite lines from an op-ed from a half year ago or retweets from what seemed like a lifetime ago, but I couldn’t in good conscience accuse her of taking things out of context. I had said what I meant. There was no second date.
The experience left me simultaneously impressed and a little bit angry. She had sounded so reasonable, and yet the idea of setting aside personal chemistry because of someone’s lukewarm sense of sympathy for J.K. Rowling or opinion on the future of cultural Judaism in America seemed kind of crazy to me. The easy thing would have been to write it off as a one off, but the more I looked around the more frequent this kind of approach seemed to be. Every other profile on Bumble seemed to say “no Trump voters,” and others made a shared commitment to dismantling capitalism the precondition to have cocktails in the West Village. A girl who ended up becoming a girlfriend asked how I felt about the riots in New York and elsewhere over the summer: I felt that my future with her hung in the balance as I composed a text in response. These weren’t exactly conversations: they were like LSAT questions. There were wrong answers.
Lest you think this kind of dating cancel culture exists only on the left side of the political spectrum, I was recently set up with a girl by a mutual friend. The texting was good, and things seemed promising. Then, like a rapid fire question on Meet the Press, she asked me who I had voted for in the *2012* Presidential election. Worlds turned on the Romney-Obama clash from a decade ago, clearly. She explained that she never dated Democrats, and that anyone who had cast a vote for Obama was fundamentally suspect. We went out, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d already lost the primary. There was no second date.
Covid has provided a whole new set of litmus tests on top of the venerable political ones. Profiles on every dating app are littered with conditions and lines in the sand, exhortations to “follow CDC” guidelines and expectations of Zoom dates and outdoor walks. This winter, I went on a date with one girl who said that she had no plans to hang out indoors with anyone, at any point, as we shivered in winter coats. There was no second date. This time, it was my choice.
On the one hand, dating of any kind is all about compatibility. It makes a certain sense to be aligned on things large and small. Relationships can falter for all kinds of reasons from the macro to the micro, and in a political, partisan, and polarized age politics plays a bigger role than ever before.
On the other hand, it is precisely the deadening and all consuming nature of our political climate that makes this kind of filtering so depressing and unimaginative. Recent studies show that more than half of single people would not consider dating someone who voted differently than them, with Democrats more picky than Republicans. Marriages across party lines are rare, and getting rarer. Political and matrimonial odd couples like James Carville and Mary Matalin and the Conways are the exceptions that prove the rule.
I think this is really bad. The personal should be a space a little bit free of politics, or at least a place where ideology takes a back seat to other more intimate kinds of congruences. The soil should be rich and fun enough that all kinds of funky plants can grow in it. It isn’t about being apolitical: it is about seeing people as full and whole selves, and recognizing that intimate relationships are among other things what the art critic Blake Gopnik calls paintings: “machines for thinking.” And that thinking, if it is going to yield anything worthwhile, is going to have to meet difference as well as similarity.
The problem is not only that narrow political filters applied to romance are poor proxies for telling you anything really interesting or true. It is that selecting on that basis means you are less likely to examine the other criteria you are employing: it indicates a worldview that is strict and lenient in all the wrong places. It loops in the rote and banal, and holds a stop sign up to serendipity and the explosive chemistry that can happen when you reach across the aisle.
Break your own rules, just a little bit. It’s nearly always worth it.
Happy Good Friday + Passover,
A