Connor Halloran says his last relationship wasn’t entirely quashed by a disagreement with his now ex-partner over politics, but it was “almost the last straw.”
Halloran said his past partner’s contradictory views “made me judge her a little differently in a way that I didn’t really want to be around her as much anymore.”
He’s not alone — at least on the University of Ottawa campus, where most students either said politics is pivotal in their relationships or that they avoid bringing it up altogether.
CBC Radio’s The House caught Halloran and his friend and fellow geography major Alex Kelly as they stepped out onto a campus sidewalk after an exam on Wednesday.
Kelly maintains it’s best to keep politics out of dating to “avoid conflict and confrontation.”
“Is that kind of living in secrecy? Maybe a little bit,” Kelly said. “But, I mean, [if] you want a long-lasting relationship, I think sometimes a little bit of secrecy is good — maybe.”
Alex Kelly, left, and Connor Halloran, right, spoke to CBC Radio’s The House on Oct. 14 at the University of Ottawa. (David Cummings/CBC)
The cautious sentiments are “very familiar” to Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life, who, in his most recent book, looks at how politics has impacted some youths’ dating lives as a symptom of a larger social trend.
“There is this incredible wariness about dating someone even with a little bit of a different political take or whose identity didn’t quite align,” Cox told The House.
In Generation Uncoupled, Cox examines the growing political divide among young American women and men. Cox says he interviewed over 100 people whose personal stories his book relies on.
“It’s not necessarily that young men are becoming more conservative, but young women are becoming much, much more liberal,” he said.
In his research, Cox said he found social media plays a role in fragmenting young Americans along gender lines.
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“When it comes to the algorithms, they are both very, very powerful and they are better able to identify gender than almost any other attribute,” Cox said.
“So young men and young women have very different experiences when they’re on the same social media platforms, and their realities are shaped by this understanding, this sort of validation machine that is affirming their perspectives, experiences and point of view.”
Cox also points to the divisive politics of U.S. President Donald Trump, in a chapter titled The Divider in Chief, and told The House the president serves as the biggest dealbreaker “by a landslide” when it comes to young people’s relationships.
“When I talked to a lot of young women who said that they could not date a Trump supporter, his policies never really came up,” Cox said. “Rather it was his demeaning comments about women, belittling behaviour, his history of sexual assault allegations.”
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According to Andrew Parkin, executive director of the Environics Institute For Survey Research, youth aren’t feeling the same split north of the border.
“People in the U.S. are reacting to their political developments,” Parkin told The House. “We haven’t had a leader like Trump to provoke that kind of reaction to see what would happen.”
Parkin pointed to a longstanding polling trend of young women tending to lean a bit more toward the left than young men, who generally lean a little more socially conservative, saying the difference has “been there for a while, and it’s not growing.”
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“Men are not generally becoming more conservative,” he said.
“To the extent that there’s a gender difference among younger people, between young men and young women, it’ll be women that are a little bit more dissatisfied” with government and the political system.
The House also checked in with Melissa and Conrad Muhly, a couple living just outside of Philadelphia.
Since the start of their 25 years of marriage, a once trivial political wrinkle between them has grown in significance: Melissa is a dual Canada-U.S. citizen and has been voting Democrat while Conrad voted for Trump.
Conrad said politics “matters significantly” when it comes to relationships.
Melissa said political differences weren’t a big deal when they started dating 26 years ago, adding, “these days it feels almost like your political views become part of your value system and your soul.”
“Now, we have a great marriage, a great relationship for both of us,” Conrad said. “For someone starting out, I think to have [such] diametric views, it would be very difficult to have a relationship.”
“I think that it would be very tough for a couple newly dating to navigate these waters,” Melissa said. “We’ve been able to do it, but it hasn’t always been easy.”
Asked whether they would end up married had they met today, Melissa didn’t mince words: “absolutely not.… In fact, I wouldn’t date a Republican, if I’d known what one was 25 years ago.”
“I would, you know, try to sway my significant other at the time to see the right side of things, and if she did, we would get along fine,” Conrad responded, as they both chuckled.
