Should You Date Someone With Different Politics?

Let’s talk politics.

We live in a peculiar world in this regard. A world in which political matters are often taken very seriously, in some cases to the point of being essentially a religion. But, with this being the case, the question cannot help but arise; should two people form a romantic relationship from different ends of the political spectrum?

If I had to give a short answer, it would be “no.”

If I had to give a somewhat more nuanced answer, it would be “probably not, but it depends.”

You see, it is one thing to have political disagreements with a friend or neighbor, to hash things out and come to verbal blows every now and again with someone you like and see regularly. It is quite another thing to do this with your spouse, for your partner in life to hold a different understanding of the world from yours. Just how much this will disrupt your relationship depends on what place politics has in your life and, yes, what those politics are.

I’m afraid there’s no getting around it; political views are not created equal.

Some are more compatible than others, some are more open to opposing views than others. Because, every political perspective is, at the bottom, a narrative for understanding the world (at least as far as the interactions of society are concerned). Depending on what that narrative is, it will tend to create more or less hostility toward a different narrative and those who hold it.

A classical liberal and a libertarian, for instance, will likely get along better than either will with a socialist or even a mainstream liberal, because the narratives of each side directly address those of the other as being fundamentally opposed to their own, while regarding each other as more or less variations on the same premise. Whether this is true or not (that is, how the actual content of a given political philosophy compares to another) is, for our purposes, less important than whether they believe it to be true.

The short version is that if you think your spouse is perpetuating a moral evil or encouraging tyranny and oppression, then your relationship will have problems.  

There's also no one-size-fits all model when it comes to these things.

Something to keep in mind here is that even passionately ‘political’ people typically have only a handful of key ideas that they take an active interest in, while more or less defaulting to a broad set of relative norms on others (we only have so much time and energy after all).

So, one person may feel very strongly about abortion, leading her to vote conservative. As such she would tend to ‘default’ to other conservative positions, such as a free-market economy, without paying them too much mind. Not always, depending on the issue in question and her own interests, but ordinarily.

This is important for our purposes because agreement on such fundamental issues would be a major factor in whether two people with otherwise divergent politics could get along: a self-described liberal and a self-described conservative might each feel strongly about, say, freedom of speech and only lukewarmly on most other issues. If so, they would have a decent chance of having a successful relationship. Far better than two people who each felt strongly, and strongly opposed, on a given subject, or even people who were indifferent to each other’s favored subject but defaulted to different sides.

The bottom line on all this is clear.

What this comes down to is the fairly obvious fact that how much a person’s political views affect his relationships is largely dependent on how important those views are to him, either individually or as a whole. Two people who vote differently, but barely discuss the subject the rest of the time are likely to get along…provided that nothing happens to make one or the other suddenly take more of an interest.

For therein lies the danger, and one of the reasons the simple answer to this question is “no.” Both people and politics change over time. Someone who today ‘leans’ a certain way may come to lean heavier as time goes on.

If, for instance, your spouse’s political ‘side’ begins to shift further from yours, then he will tend to shift with it. Not always, but often. Likewise if something happens in the world that causes him to take more of an interest in politics, that formerly unimportant difference may no longer be so unimportant. In short, an apparently trivial disagreement today can easily become a life-shattering split in ten years if you begin to take it more seriously. This potentially creates a domestic time-bomb.

Thousands of couples have been discovering this to their cost over the past decade or so.  

Of course, everyone and everything changes over time, politics included. No one really knows what his views will be ten years hence. But there is a difference between starting from a place of agreement and starting from a place of mild disagreement. The former has to first be broken. The latter is already cracked and only needs to be widened.  

The conclusion is, again, fairly obvious; you and your partner really should be in agreement on all important questions before you get married. This includes politics. You may not exactly agree on every issue (again, most people only have a handful of questions they are really passionate about), but you should at least have fundamentally compatible points of view.

If you don’t, then there could be trouble down the road.