Weekend Essay: The Politics of Romance and Friendship

Despite growing disenchantment and predictions of digital death, the world of dating apps is very much alive, if arguably unwell. This month, the newly created conservative dating app, The Right Stuff, launches, widening the partisan aisle and narrowing the dating pools on either side.Aiming to narrow America’s dating pool to anti-woke, pro-Trump, strictly male- or female-identifying conservatives, The Right Stuff, which is financially backed by heavy-hitter Peter Thiel, is the brainchild of Ryann McEnany, sister of a former White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and a former Trump political aide, John McEntee. Touting features like free accounts for women, the app’s first promotional video shows Ms. McEnany demonstrating how to build an ideal profile, selecting a profile photo with President Trump and typing “President” in response to the app’s prompt, ‘Alexa, change the _____.”Like the founders of Maple Match and Liberal Hearts before her, Ms. McEnany is seeking to capitalize on America’s growing partisan divide in the realm of romance. The question is: Should she be? How much of a determining factor is diverging political ideology when it comes to the likelihood of divorce, and how likely is it that a predominance of partisan couples will contribute to a healthier America? For the sake of love, family, and society’s optimal progression, should we be selecting partners on the basis of political ideology? In 2017, the New York Daily News reported that 22 percent of Americans “knew a couple whose marriage or relationship was negatively impacted” by Mr. Trump’s election, and, citing a Wakefield research study, also noted that 29 percent of Americans self-reported having experienced Trump-related tension in their relationships. Even more astounding, as of 2017, 11 percent of American couples and 22 percent of millennials have ended relationships because of political differences. The evidence, then, seems to point us toward protecting the partisan divide, making apps like The Right Stuff a value-add for our society. I can’t help but wonder, though, whether we would be more likely to dismantle echo chambers and expand the marketplace of ideas if we were to marry across political lines, a la the very-much-in-love but very-much-opposed James Carville and Mary Matalin. Wouldn’t we force ourselves to be a more tolerant and less volatile species if we didn’t only mingle with and marry like-minded people?In a fascinating lecture, “The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives,” a social psychologist and NYU professor of ethical leadership, David Haidt, attempts to sketch the development of the moral mind, theorizing about the ways in which we are and become liberal- or conservative-leaning. Mr. Haidt offers what he believes are the five foundations of morality, arguing that people arrive to the world with these foundations etched on the “first draft” of our moral minds, or, at the very least, with “a preparedness to learn all these things.” They are: harm/care; fairness/reciprocity; ingroup/loyalty; authority/respect; and purity/sanctity. Mr. Haidt explains that, as liberals develop, they tend to care most or only about harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, while conservatives care about all five foundations. Liberals, he says, “speak for the weak and oppressed; they want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos.… Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order, even at some cost to those on the bottom.”Having established his frame, Mr. Haidt concludes by saying, “… once you see that Liberals and Conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability, then I think the way is open to step outside the moral matrix.” He acknowledges that we all think we’re correct and that our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, but suggests that, if we want to solve problems by changing minds, we must first understand our moral psychology and step out of the moral matrix, even if only for a moment. “That’s the essential move to cultivate moral humility,” he says.So it would seem that Mr. Haidt, too, would be in favor of bipartisan romance. Although he speaks of the righteous mind’s evolutionary inclination to form teams, it sounds like our best chance at finding balance and humility exists somewhere outside of our own tribes.Mr. Haidt also points to a key quality in liberals that one would think would predispose them to intermarry, so to speak. The trait of openness — to new ideas and experiences — is a predictor of which people will become liberals, he says. The thing is, liberal openness seemed to break down in a sort of unprecedented way during the Trump era. I heard dozens of liberal friends, who may have been tolerant of conservative romantic partners in years prior, say that Trump supporters represented a bridge too far. As Vox reported in 2016, only 33 percent of women said that they would date Trump supporters, and male Trump supporters were twice as likely to be “blocked” on dating apps than non-Trump supporters. Perhaps the essence, when it comes to a liberal’s identifying feature of openness, is in its being openness to new ideas and experiences, rather than institutionalized and traditional ones. Perhaps this is why the left earned the stereotype of being open only to those further left than they. Still, I wonder about why Mr. Trump’s presidency ushered in the greatest romantic and neighborly breakdown in our nation’s history, and I think it must have something to do with respect.With 50 years of research behind them, John Gottman and his team have been able to predict divorce with over 90 percent accuracy. They say that the presence of contempt — respect’s opposite — is the greatest pollutant to healthy relationships and one of the best predictors of their demise.Combing through my own dating memories, I’d have to agree. I wanted to hurl my phone across the park when I received the following Gender Studies lesson via text: “Here’s the difference between men and women when it comes to providing. Women want to earn money so they can feel independent and provide for themselves … men need to earn money so they can provide for their wife and children.” On the other hand, more recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself warming to someone on the opposite side of the aisle when he told me that, though he was conservative-leaning, Mr. Trump’s politics didn’t represent his highest values and the “politics of hope” toward which he tends to incline. Swoon.So where does all of this leave us? I suppose each of us has a different divergence threshold and a different system for earning and awarding respect. Each of us has to determine whether a prospective partner is someone with whom joint decisions can be made. Maybe, though, all of our decisions would be more full-bodied if they represented less singular and more inflected thinking. Perhaps that monetary step outside of the moral matrix could, in part, last a lifetime. Perhaps my colleague, Ari Hoffman, put it best: “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.”

Weekend Essay: The Politics of Romance and Friendship

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