The path of true love never did run smooth. But for Trump voters, it seems to be especially rocky. Or so says Emily Moreno, who recently founded a dating app for conservative Americans, after noticing how many of her Republican friends were complaining of being sexually shunned for their political allegiances. “If people do get a date, either they have to self-censor or they don’t get a second date,” she tells this month’s edition of Elle magazine rather plaintively. And sure enough her Donald Daters app, with its nifty slogan “Make America date again”, has been downloaded 25,000 times since October. It seems there are a lot of lonely Trumpers out there paying the ultimate price for hotly defending the pussy-grabber-in-chief.
Cue the world’s smallest violin, obviously. There aren’t many ways in which ordinary young liberal Americans can fight back, but refusing to sleep with anyone who still wants to build that wall is evidently one of them. I was struck too by the Californian dating coach I interviewed this year who had started advising her female clients to sound out their date’s political leanings as early as possible, on the grounds that being relaxed about the president’s locker room talk could indicate a pretty cavalier attitude to women and consent. One of the more unexpected side-effects of culture wars is the way politics and sex are becoming more inextricably intertwined.
In the UK too it’s becoming increasingly tempting to treat voting intentions as a crude proxy for underlying prejudices and assumptions. In the months after the referendum, British Tinder users started adding leave or remain to their profiles, and that was just the start of it. No woke millennial wants to end up arguing about food banks in bed, so instructions to swipe left if you don’t like Jeremy Corbyn, on the grounds that it’s obviously never going to work, are arguably only saving everyone time. Refusing to date outside your political comfort zone is becoming socially acceptable, even admirable, in a way that refusing to date outside your social class, educational background or city absolutely wouldn’t be.
Yet it’s funny how often, in practice, they amount to much the same thing. High earners were more likely than low ones to vote remain, and graduates have different voting patterns from people who left school after GCSEs. There are reasons Sunderland votes differently from Shoreditch, or indeed from rural Shropshire. The trouble with treating politics as the ultimate expression of values, still less a moral purity test, is that people with very similar values can end up ticking very different boxes on a ballot paper, depending on their life experiences.
And for the vast majority of people who don’t even think about politics much beyond elections, meanwhile, broad party allegiances still conceal a world of surprises. No thinking person welcomes everything their chosen leader does, and all parties contain people clinging on with gritted teeth, hoping things get better.
Or to put it another way, in real life humans are so much messier, more unpredictable and more interesting than ideologues give them credit for. And if I’ve learned anything from half a lifetime of living with a husband whose take on any given political hot potato is often (though not always) contrary to mine, it’s that there are unexpected benefits to a good old family row about politics, even if it doesn’t feel that way at the time.
Arguing the toss with someone you love – whether that’s a partner, friend or family member – means being forced to think harder, disagree better, play the ideological ball rather than the person. Rows within a family or a friendship circle have consequences and while that makes them uncomfortable, in an ideal world it’s also what makes them capable of teaching us to argue with some restraint. It’s the polar opposite of the hit-and-run way we have learned to fight with strangers on social media, where everything goes nuclear in seconds because you’re never going to find yourselves having to stack the dishwasher together in awkward silence later.
This is, admittedly, going to be a scratchy Christmas for many people. Some families, friendships and marriages have been stretched to breaking point in recent years by the ideological fault lines opening up over the Scottish independence referendum, or Brexit, or disagreements within mainstream parties over how best to respond to a volatile public mood. Trains leaving the capital this weekend will be stuffed with remainers going home for Christmas to leave-voting towns, ready to sulk in their childhood bedrooms at the first mention of immigration. Peace will hold in some households only until the first person brings up Corbyn in front of the in-laws, or makes a snippy reference over the turkey to stockpiling food for March.
Even the Queen’s speech will be parsed to within an inch of its life for any disobliging reference to Meghan Markle, who currently stands accused of trying to foist her liberal views on Prince Harry by making him skip the family Boxing Day shoot. A parliament reduced to bickering over whether or not someone said “stupid woman” under their breath is in fairness only representing the squabbling, polarised nation that elected it.
In the circumstances it’s easy to see how the “never kissed a Tory” mindset could make for an easier Christmas, not to mention an easier life. And romantic tribalism has never been easier to put into practice, thanks to niche dating apps such as Donald Daters; the pool of potential mates has expanded beyond the wildest dreams of our grandparents, but so has our ability to filter them in advance, from behind the safety of a phone screen.
But the worry is that it also makes for a narrower, duller, more polarised life. While the old-fashioned British method of getting drunk and clumsily chatting people up in pubs had its very obvious drawbacks, it did allow for serendipity, raw chemistry and opposites attracting. Over the years, couples drawn together despite their differences could rub off each other’s sharp ideological corners. Growing up in an extended family of sometimes noisily clashing views is, meanwhile, the single best way of absorbing two incredibly useful life lessons: first, that sometimes perfectly lovely people can be horribly misguided; and second, that sometimes people who appear horribly misguided have their reasons, often ones you have arrogantly overlooked.
There will always be some ideological lines nobody wants to cross, some ugly prejudices a relationship can’t get over. But the truth is most families will not be re-fighting the battle of Cable Street in their living rooms next week, and if a brief Christmas truce was possible between the trenches of the Somme then most of us should be able to manage it. If all else fails, it helps to remember that nobody ever looked dignified shouting the odds about WTO rules in a paper hat.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
