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What do you think of male-female dating dynamics relative to the culture war? I have a lot of thoughts on this but ultimately think the people worth pursuing are not crossing people off their list because they don’t believe in X or Y.
But it might be beyond your control. As an American, I remember swiping on tinder in London and seeing ‘Do not swipe if you are Republican’ but they replaced the word with something called the Tories. Clearly some people will only date people that share the same ideology. Which is fair if you want someone to nod along to whatever you say, I guess.
It gets tricky when you outright pretend to believe things you don’t. It’s not courageous or respectable. Not apologizing for what you believe is paramount to gaining the respect of your partner. Obviously, when I say this, I’m really talking about relatively conservative men dating liberal women. And honestly, except for far left people like Hasan piker that glorify violent revolution in such a way that they do a 360 and put off conservative ethos, I do think men women find attractive aren’t the male feminist, Bernie bro type. It’s almost like a yin and yang thing where you want some tension with your ideals.
Unlike religion, I really don’t see a need to agree with my SO on much of anything (odd to me that JD Vance and Usha married despite this). It’s sad to think that, on the spectrum of ‘not scaring the hoes’ political ideology, you could have a good thing with someone, say the wrong thing, and lose a relationship because of it.
Only thinking this because I’m coming to terms that I don’t necc need to date a based woman who appreciates old Sam Hyde stuff and edgy right wing leaning online happenings. I’d rather not select for political belief, find someone that will lightly argue with me, and has no interest in that stuff. Likewise, I’ll voice my opinion to her but not make fun of her for being on bluesky or whatever
You can generally treat anything said in a dating app as an aspirational preference. "I want a tall, handsome, rich man" yeah but she will settle for someone 5'10" ok looking and with steady employment.
"I wont date a republican" probably settles to something like "don't embarrass me in front of my friends with your icky conservative views". Meanwhile you are at a cookout with her girlfriends and all of their partners and lo and behold every other guy there is also some version of conservative-lite. With even the "liberals" being pro-gun or against extreme welfare state handouts.
Hysteria and hyperbole abound online, but the real world is full of lots of quiet compromise and people getting on with their lives.
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In theory, it seems reasonable that people should not enter relationships where the parties have strongly held but conflicting political views.
My objection is that the modern Left seems to have this aggressive purity thing going on where they boycott X; boycott anyone that transacts with X; boycott anyone who transacts with anyone who transacts with X; and so on. For example, I heard that Guy Fieri, who is basically a blue collar restaurant critic, got in trouble because he was seen talking with one of the Tate brothers. Apparently he's publicly disavowed the Tate brothers, but if he hadn't, I wouldn't have been surprised if the Left started pressuring his network. Perhaps "boycott" isn't quite the right word, but I think you see my point.
Anyway, my sense is that when a woman says she won't date anyone who voted for Trump, it's usually not so much about incompatibility as it is about wanting to demonstrate her ideological purity. There's a difference between saying something like "I'm progressive in my politics so if you are a hard core MAGA type, probably we won't get along" and saying something like "If you voted for Trump, swipe left!"
Of course the truth is that any Trump voter probably wouldn't want to seriously date someone who was that so into progressive politics that they were on the purity bandwagon. But even so, I think it points to a bigger problem in our culture at the moment: The Left is just ferociously aggressive and intolerant of disagreement or dissent.
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I think honestly for a lot of people, politics is religion, it’s a complete world view that they take on faith that colors and shapes the rest of their lives. It comes with assumptions about what is good or evil, who and what humanity is, and how we deal with the environment and poverty and technology and so on. So it only makes sense that people now treat political differences the way someone would treat religious differences in an earlier era. There was a time when the denomination you followed was important enough to break relationships for. We don’t do that even with religion anymore— mixed religion relationships are perfectly acceptable in most cases. But if you lived in 1626, it would have mattered a great deal whether you were Catholic or Lutheran or Anglican and it would have been unthinkable to be close friends of anyone who didn’t share your faith, let alone a Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or something.
This. You can date someone from the other political party if you both have a different religion. You can't date someone whose politics is religion, and is opposed to yours.
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Being into radical politics almost certainly correlates with mental illness, an unstable personality, etc, and possibly prioritizing “the mission” over your family, a stable job, showing up at Thanksgiving etc. It also marks someone out as having low agreeableness, which is also bad in a partner. So generally, the smart move is to find someone broadly centrist, maybe a little left or a little right, within whatever the Overton window is in your society.
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All major Christian denominations discourage interfaith marriage - not being unequally yoked is in the Bible. Catholicism explicitly discourages interdenominational marriage, because it creates conflicts about which denomination children will be raised in. Islam only permits interfaith marriage if it is a muslim man marrying a non-muslim woman who he does not intend to treat as a human being. Ethnic religions like Judaism discourage interfaith marriage for different reasons, but it becomes a load-bearing part of the religion and associated culture. And in a world where most people actually believed in their religion, religion is a proxy for core moral values.
So "Don't date someone with different core moral values" is lindy, and the reasons why it is good advice, at least as regards potentially babymaking relationships, still apply just like they always did. (Either one of you will have to abandon passing on values to their children, or you will end up raising the children as moral relativists.) And in the 21st century people define their core moral values by their politics, not their religion. Someone who actually believes in wokism would struggle to co-parent with someone who doesn't. Obviously the same is true of the political-religious hybrid that is red tribe evangelicalism, and I would say it is true to a lesser extent of red-hat wearing MAGAism and establishment liberalism.
There is a separate issue that left-wing women believe, correctly, that right-wing political views are correlated with anti-feminist attitudes that the women in question consider misogynistic (and to a lesser extent with views that really are misogynistic), and that right-wing women believe, correctly, that left-wing political views are correlated with feminist misandry. I'm a liberal, and even my dating strategy included an early filter to rule out feminists. So politics are an actually-useful filter in a world where there are enough apparent options that you can afford to use a noisy filter.
Finally, there is a signalling aspect. Publically stating that you won't engage in interfaith dating is a signal that:
Both of these are signals you would want to send. If Tinder existed in the 1950's, it would provide a filter so Catholics could avoid seeing Protestant profiles and vice versa, lots of people would use it, and there would be a mild stigma to not using it.
Putanumonit's The skewed and the screwed is a good discussion of the negative practical consequences of this.
"Tories" refers to members and supporters of the Conservative party - it is an informal term used both as a self-descriptor and as a slur, dating back to the era where the Whigs and Tories were aristocratic factions rather than organised political parties. I doubt the chick in question is using the word accurately - I assume she would be even less likely to date a Reform or Restore supporter than a Conservative.
Yeah but in dating apps not self-declaring a conservative leaning as a man is just a basic shit-test to see if you have any ability to hide your power level. The majority of the women trying to filter by that don't actually believe anything and/or will bury political disagreements if they feel chemistry otherwise when actually meeting.
The "Hello Human Resources" meme reigns supreme. Or... women's incentives generally lead them to putting up "brick wall" filters that exclude all men, thus accepting only men who figure out how to bypass the filters. Much of the problem of modern dating is the enforcement of those filters becoming far too good.
IMO it's this and the nature of online dating meaning that attempts inherently become 'all or nothing' since you can't just have an awkward convo then randomly bump into the same girl 2 weeks later when she's forgotten about it/smoothed it out. Now it's all in DMs and goes in the permanent record.
When somebody's only in your social orbit off an app it's way easier to discard the good for the perfect.
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It depends on whether these beliefs are deeply internalized and impact real life behavior and decisions, or if they are vibes, aesthetics and slogans. It also matters how radical the woman is in the left ideology. If it's relatively moderate, echoing the mainstream schooling and institutional messaging, then it just signals being well-adjusted and agreeable. If they are mindkilled into talking about this all the time and are turning antinatalist because of the climate crisis and freaking out about the issue of the day all the time, then it's a pass. But most people live their lives modeled around what they see around them in real life. If they grew up in a stable family, have siblings who managed to form stable families and are going about life in a "normal" and "sane" way that is functional in the existing society (I do see that not everyone agrees on what that is, but you have to judge it from your own position), then it doesn't really matter if they are doing some signaling with these things that have been shown to them as being "the good causes" from kindergarten on, their whole lives.
In fact, I'd be more wary of an urban young woman who somehow decided to go "based". It may not be an issue but it seems they somehow couldn't fit in, either because they are very disagreeable and contrarian, or they had to rely on this strategy to stand out and attract men, which is also suspicious. It can all be clarified and may be fine, especially if they come from some conservative family or simply have this kind of social group somehow and it's not some kind of daily crusade, who knows.
My point is these declarations of party affiliations, slogans, logos, symbols are often superficial and compartmentalized. They are not much deeper than whether she likes Nike or Adidas shoes. What matters is how they behave on a daily basis, what they value and how they see the future, whose life advice they take seriously, what kind of life patterns are present in her closest friends and family, what's her personality like etc. But the deeply held beliefs and the life patterns they take seriously are super important. You have to agree on the actual ground level of how you live together, when and how you have kids, how you split the tasks, how important careers are, is moving every few years to climb the ladder worth it, versus staying put in one place and settling for long, etc.
If you're not aiming for a marriage and family yet, and plan to break up in a few years (or months) either way, then yes, you only need minimal compatibility in abstract beliefs, you just need attraction and a compatible schedule and activity level and agree you'll use contraception and abort if that fails. Well, okay that's a bit of agreement required right there...
Yes there is very much a case where the rare women who actually self identity as conservative on a dating app tend to be right of Hitler
If you're going to fish in the shallow end of the gene pool, the catch may have tumors.
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I think it is also relevant that both wokism and the "based" right are malignant from a normie or establishment liberal perspective. If your worldview is normie or establishment liberal, you shouldn't date a wokist or a "Nazi", excluding the scenario where you are a man going for a pump-and-dump in which case the fact that she is a human being with thoughts and feelings is mostly irrelevant anyway.
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