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Can you date folks with different politics?
I watch this stream yesterday and i find it quite interesting. Im actually kinda in this situation now, i took a girl on a date, she made it obvious she was a progressive. I often dont share my own views on these things in real life, due to how toxic these conversations can be, so i just try to listen and empathize with where the person is coming from. Though im planning to open my mouth a little more about things on the 2nd go round, as to not give a misleading representation of who i am.
Whats interesting is that the streamer in question distinct "politics" from "human rights", she gives a pretty weak example with Roe V Wade. However i think the distinction between "politics" and "human rights" is shaky to begin with. No one really agrees on what human rights even are, per her roe example, gun control (constitutional arguably, but still) being another one, & there are still societies/people that arent accepting of LGBT although thats been on the decline over some decades. My guess is she is taking this to mean, "you probably shouldnt date a nazi", which is perfectly fine. But there arent a lot of those guys around in this day and age. For myself, i dont really believe any idea is above criticism, so i dont see how having a different idea of what constitutes human rights is much different from just having different politics.
According to pew research, most people, (myself included) are fine with dating people across the political aisle {note that many people wouldnt date a trump voter, but many would date a republican, but i suspect many people might view trump as a fundamentally immoral individual, and thus that makes him distinct from just mere disagreement}. I also find that peoples political beliefs arent good measures of how moral they are in real life. There are many progressives ive seen who were cheaters, liars, lazy, ect & conservatives who were kind hearted, hard working, & loving ect (& vice versa). But i want to know what you guys think.
I routinely encounter dating profiles where the bio reads something like "If you're a Tory/voted Leave/support Brexit, swipe left" (in spite of the fact that I live in Ireland - the Republic, not the north).
The uncharitable interpretation of women who write things like this is that their thought process is something like "I could never have anything in common with a man who voted for Brexit, so us going on a date would be a waste of both our time." Which is a worldview I don't agree with.
The charitable interpretation is more like "Even if I did get along with a guy who voted for Brexit and found him attractive, I still couldn't bring myself to date someone with whom I have a fundamental value difference."
I suspect that a lot of this is really insincere signalling, however, and most of these women would hold their nose if they met a guy they really liked whose politics didn't align with their own.
Vice had an amusing article about conservative men trying to pass themselves off as woke in order to get with woke girls.
Oh man, between that Vice article and the OPs Youtube discussion, it just reminds me why I love TheMotte and how awful discussion on non-Motte platforms is. I mean that article ended with this gem: “But also, if you’re a wokefish, it might genuinely be worth considering: why do I hold views that I’m too ashamed to publicly express?”
Are they really this incapable of imagining the shoe being on the other foot? How about trying to date while woke in some small town in Alabama? Could they imagine it then? Or the framing noted by the OP, how my political values are human rights issues, yours are mere politics. Whenever I leave the motte I realize that being able to decouple, discuss things above the object-level and imagine other perspectives with any level of charity is so incredibly rare and precious
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