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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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It depends on how deeply you both are certain and convinced and how well-founded your beliefs are. Most people only very shallowly know politics, if you prod a little you very quickly find that they don't have solid reasons for believing things, there are many contradictions and inconsistencies and questions they have not though through ever. I definitely feel so myself when reading certain people here, and then some people I know are even more so.

So explicit politics is often pretty arbitrary. It depends on one's social circles and is a bit like religion: a protestant and a catholic can be in a good marriage if their confession is not a deep and central part of their life.

Whats more important are implicit political beliefs that may actually (consciously or not) be opposite to the explicitly proclaimed beliefs. Implicit beliefs and culture, like the practical rubber-meets-road understanding of gender roles, parenthood, what a relationship is and what it's supposed to be about, whether to have kids and if yes how to raise them.

These worldview aspects are important of you are looking for the mother of your future kids. But if you're just looking for a sex partner for a few months, then who cares? Then what matters is probably mostly sexual attraction, compatibility and whether any beliefs stop either party from having sex (very conservative, religious etc).

So I think explicit political beliefs can actually falsely make it seem like two people are so different, but if they broadly actually do and want similar things in life (eg value college education, see similar things as desirable for the future like where and how to live), then it can work. In such cases the politics is just a thin aesthetic preference.

But it's not always so. You may find someone who is a progressive climate doomer who refuses to have a car, despises you if you have one, is obsessed with zero waste, is vegan and doesn't tolerate you eating meat in your shared home. Then it will be hard to live together. It all depends on how much it impacts real life everyday decisions and how much he/she believes that it's not only about her/his choices but those choices must also be enthusiastically mirrored by you,or if they are more tolerant and chill and understand that their understanding of what's moral isn't complete and 100% right in every aspect.

So I think explicit political beliefs can actually falsely make it seem like two people are so different, but if they broadly actually do and want similar things in life (eg value college education, see similar things as desirable for the future like where and how to live), then it can work. In such cases the politics is just a thin aesthetic preference.

My wife has substantially different political opinions and I wouldn't call it thin aesthetics, but otherwise I agree. Majority of our political differences simply never come up too often. Those differences that come up, we made explicit compromises about early on, and soon those compromises became the normal. I think we both today equally like both of us have one place where we both have learned to actively ignore the rage-inducing news cycle, that is, our home.

I feel like there needs to be some kind of community for people in mixed-politics marriages. It seems we are a dying breed!