Love in the Age of Landmines
If you are a non-conformist like me, modern dating can sometimes feel like a political minefield. The tension starts before you even match or message, with Tinder and Grindr bios adorned with the flags of Zion or Palestine and announcements like “I hate conservatives” that stand out like stop signs. You wonder how many people are keeping their partisan prejudices and national loyalties secret only to have them discovered after politics sneaks into the conversation. I have been on plenty of dates that definitely would have imploded if I’d voted for Trump. A recent date ended when he abruptly left in disgust over my support for Israel. He didn’t even finish his wine.
As it happens, I am not a conservative, but I might as well be to the pinkos who inhabit Brooklyn and hang around LGBT circles. I’m a bi man and a centrist Democrat in his mid-20s who doesn’t toe the line on identity politics or, in the case of my aforementioned date, have sympathy for Hamas. I recently visited an old lover who invited me to an event called “Bear Wednesday.” However, I was swiftly reminded that my politics would be unpopular and that I should keep my mouth shut. This is a dynamic I’ve become all too familiar with when I enter LGBT spaces, but it’s part of a much larger phenomenon. Modern technology has amplified social sorting mechanisms in the US, especially in dating, pushing aside the genuine connections that transcend political divides and turning courtship into a powder keg of ideological purity tests.
The media has reported on political intolerance in the dating scene and LGBT circles for more than a decade. Notably, gay commentators such as Douglas Murray and Andrew Sullivan have berated the LGBT movement for being too radical and unwelcoming to conservatives, moderates, and freethinkers. Such critiques are almost repetitious at this point, echoing a previous era when feminist Betty Friedan criticized the Women’s Movement for similar faults. But this is a national issue that goes far beyond niche activist circles. Polarization is tearing at the love lives of huge percentages of LGBT and straight Americans alike, with a staggering 71% of young Democrats saying they wouldn’t date across the aisle in 2021. Several years earlier, around the beginning of the Trump era, a wave of writing emerged on the growing divide in the dating scene between liberals and conservatives. Tinder users began to “demarcate” themselves politically, dates ended with dramatic exits, and years-long relationships ended. Political partisanship in dating has only intensified in the years since.
Source: Axios.
The social scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone (2000) and The Upswing (2020) has long lamented the impact of technology on polarization and declining rates of social connectedness more generally. He identified television as an early disrupter of human relationships in the US. Since TV entered our homes, increasingly advanced screen-based technologies have penetrated the most intimate aspects of our lives and relationships. Social media and dating apps shoehorned partisanship and highly charged culture wars into areas of life in which politics was once a strict taboo.
Dating apps accentuate existing mate selection tendencies to favor status markers such as signs of wealth, physical attractiveness, and similar values, while nearly eliminating the “serendipity” associated with in-person attributes such as personality, charm, kindness, and body language. Potential mates are even judged more attractive when their political views are the same. Features that directly filter for political affiliation were introduced in 2016 on Bumble and as recently as 2024 on Tinder. These filters further amplify status-driven sorting tendencies, exacerbating political polarization, benefiting the well-educated, and making cross-partisan dating encounters even rarer.
A 2024 Wall Street Journal article explored the growing political divide between Gen-Z men and women, with young men skewing rightward, young women skewing to the left, women surpassing men in obtaining college degrees — and the gap widening. As such, Gen-Zers are more aggressively sorting themselves by politics and education. Similar articles citing an array of research have found the same thing. One survey from a dating app found that more than half of daters would dump someone over politics, and more than a third of women refuse to date someone whose politics they disagreed with. As a USA Today headline aptly put it: “Gen Z's widening gender divide has turned political. It's ruining our relationships.”
As cross-partisan dating has declined, so has dating and marriage in general. Cohabitation, it must be noted, has significantly increased for 18- to 24-year-olds from 0.1% in 1968 to 9.4% in 2018. However, this increase is not substantial enough to offset the massive decline in marriage among the same age group, which fell from 39.2% in 1968 to 7.3% in 2018. And for all the talk about “hookup culture” in the 2010s, more young people than ever are single and celibate — clear signs of disconnection in the “connected” age. These trends are interrelated with political polarization because they are all symptoms of disruptive technologies and low rates of social capital. As Robert Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, social capital is “connections among individuals — social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.”
Recent research on polarization and dating sheds some additional light. The American Enterprise Institute found that politics has become a more significant factor in mate selection than in the past, especially among Gen-Z. This data supports similar findings from the 2020 Cambridge study “The Democracy of Dating.” Nationally, interracial and cross-religion marriages are up, but cross-party marriages are now “extremely rare” — only about 4% of marriages. Some observers predict that these trends will cause a marriage crisis because, statistically speaking, the addition of politics as a non-negotiable filter severely limits one’s available dating pool.
The body of research makes it starkly clear that both sides have one thing in common: how threatened they feel by each other. Many people do not want to date across the aisle because they use politics as a proxy for their potential partner’s values. Why would you want to break bread (or, for that matter, have sex) with someone whose political party sees white men as the enemy, or believes the state should take totalitarian control over your body?
This prioritization of values in mates also appears in short-term partners and hookup encounters, though it’s an understandably less significant factor. In fact, I was recently on a date where this exact phenomenon unfolded. My support for Israel resulted in an immediate declaration that a long-term relationship was off-limits because of a difference in “values.” However, I was informed that, “we can do other things” (hint hint: have casual sex). It probably won’t surprise you to hear that my date was a man, as casual sex is easier to obtain for gay or bisexual guys. This helps explain why the decline in sex among young people is much less pronounced among LGBT and especially bi people, though, as I’ve noted, the encroachment of politics into dating still reaches me as a bi man.
It may seem surprising that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is such a significant dating dealbreaker. Research finds that foreign policy plays a less significant role in mate choice than social issues. The reason Israel matters so much to potential mates is that it is a social issue for many young people. If you are in the dating market and meet someone who supports Israel, how can you imagine raising children with them when you think they support “colonialism”, “genocide”, and “apartheid”? I have good reasons to disagree with these accusations against the Jewish state, but those who passionately believe them must think Israel’s supporters are monsters.
While polarization in the dating landscape may affect the general public, it’s the most pronounced among white, highly educated, and upwardly mobile folks who strongly value social progressivism in mates — a group overrepresented on dating apps.
Data on this question is scant, but I’ve observed that flaming passions about Israel in the US are primarily concentrated among this educated class, as is a good deal of the most aggressive affective polarization. This is unsurprising given the tendency of the highly educated to take sides in symbolic struggles. We bring our culture wars, which the vast majority of people are significantly less concerned about, into our highly competitive dating scene — a significant driver of dating polarization.
In 2020, Vice’s Serena Smith found that highly competitive men participate in dating polarization by virtue signaling to attract progressive, college-educated women on dating apps. Perhaps the Palestinian flag in a Tinder bio is the next version of wearing one of those “The Future is Female” shirts at a bar?
The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, author of We Have Never Been Woke (2024), speculates that this may be more than a sexual strategy to bed university-educated women. It may also function as an elite status sorting mechanism because left-wing cultural signals are used as identifiers of social class, education, and income (given that people with such markers tend to be highly educated and high-income earners). And as we would expect, research finds high-income earners are the most likely to signal their politics on dating apps and to value political sameness in mates.
Given these tendencies among dating app users and disfavorable views about Israel among well-educated young people, it is unsurprising that this highly polarized issue is acting as a status marker in dating. This point is only emphasized by the fact that Gen-Z is significantly more likely to cut people out of their lives over views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — in person and on social media — compared to older generations.
Judging our potential mates using political litmus tests — which function as a proxy for values — seems to be a fact of human nature. Charged political debates over foreign wars and social issues have found a battlefield on the dating landscape. As technology makes dating less about connection and more about status, what should be flirtatious banter feels more like a conversational minefield.
But isn’t the miracle of love that it transcends divides?
The abolitionists and civil rights leaders of the past would be astonished at the record-high rate of interracial relationships — roughly one-third of US couples in 2022. Overcoming today’s polarization will take time and work, but it is possible. This task may seem daunting, but the easiest thing we can all do is to set aside partisan hatred when on a date and be generous and understanding with the person in front of us. Isn’t that what love is all about?
Published Mar 05, 2025
