I'm very curious about a new article in the Journal of Politics, which found that political similarities among couples isn't coming from intense conversations over dinner, but from the initial sorting process. Republicans don't date Democrats. Obama voters don't date Tea Party members.
Could someone with JSTOR clearance send me the article? Thanks. Thanks, MH.
Apt. 11d 
My husband revealed to me in recent years that he had two turnoffs when it came to possible relationships: religiosity and smoking. Fortunately, I am a non-smoking atheist. 🙂
LikeLike
Well I guess my husband and I are outliers. We were in opposite parties when we met/dated/married. After a few years marriage, one enrolled in the other party. And then a few years later both enrolled jointly in another. NBD.
LikeLike
Ugh, that was a mistake from this stupid work laptop.
Anyway, I was going to add (when I hit return and mistakenly posted the reply. Twice.) that my criteria are intelligence and similar senses of humor. That unfortunately ruled out way too many Republicans without my realizing I was doing so. 🙂
LikeLike
I’ve never understood how someone could be married to a Republican and neither has my husband. We’ve been married forever, so we’d be an example of sorting + growing together.
We do disagree on particular issues, but not on who to vote for (except in primaries).
LikeLike
I would expect that online dating is increasing this tendency, as it makes it possible (indeed, imperative) to do some pre-sorting before actually meeting people.
Likewise, I suspect that Facebook tends to aggravate differences that are not actually so glaring in day to day life.
LikeLike
I wonder how much of the sorting happens even before we get to the singles bar. Are Republicans clustered in certain geographic areas and in Democrats in others? It’s hard to meet Republicans in a bar in the East Village.
I also wonder if online dating websites has increased the political sorting. Anybody here ever done Match.com? Isn’t political affiation and religion one of the boxes that you have check off right away?
Also, I wonder if this is a bad thing or not. I imagine that homogeneity leads to a better marriage.
LikeLike
“I’ve never understood how someone could be married to a Republican and neither has my husband.”
Republicans manage it. In fact, being married correlates with being Republican.
LikeLike
Two of my sisters are in “mixed” marriages and it’s tough on them. One of my BILs was, when younger, way less sensitive to lots of social issues in the way you might overgeneralize about a NYC police officer, but over the years, with a lot of work, my sister claims, he is way more sensitive. But he still votes Republican.
LikeLike
I think it would be hilarious if Catfish did an episode on people in internet dating situations posing as being members of one party or another. I hope Nev considers it.
(Note: I, who hate reality tv, now have two reality tv passions: Catfish and Pitbulls and Parolees.)
LikeLike
“I wonder how much of the sorting happens even before we get to the singles bar. Are Republicans clustered in certain geographic areas and in Democrats in others?”
Certainly.
Laura mentions religious affiliation, which is another sorting mechanism, and not just in cyberspace. (I met my husband at the Pittsburgh Oratory at a graduate/young professional reading group.)
http://www.pittsburghoratory.org/
By the way, I’ve been wanting to share a curious fact about modern dating and this seems a good place to mention it. This will seem bizarre to 30 and 40-somethings, but I keep seeing advice column and forum questions where it’s clear that these days, some people consider themselves to be boyfriend and girlfriend with people they’ve never met in person, sometimes for a year or two at a time.
LikeLike
Catfish!!!!
http://www.mtv.com/shows/catfish/video.jhtml?filter=fulleps
LikeLike
If that doesn’t work for you, watch SNL’s take on it, which is shockingly accurate.
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/catfish/n32031/
LikeLike
Speaking of the blessings of homogeneity, I’ve been hanging out at a couple of the Catholic Answers forums and I’ve noted two kinds of forum postings.
1. I’m so in love with my non-Catholic boyfriend/girlfriend who is respectful of my religious traditions and we’re going to live happily ever after!
2. I’m married to a non-Catholic and he/she doesn’t want the kids to be raised Catholic/take the kids to church/doesn’t want more than two kids/wants me to do XYZ in bed/etc.
Not that marrying to a person of the same religious and political orientation is a cure for all marital ills, but some problems are as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning.
LikeLike
Thanks, Wendy! Now I have something to watch on TV while feeding the baby.
LikeLike
“some people consider themselves to be boyfriend and girlfriend with people they’ve never met in person, sometimes for a year or two at a time. ”
A really bizarre phenomenon that requires more sociological research, if true. Of course, everyone’s talking about it now because of the Notre Dame football player.
I can see how the situation could develop, with the increasing tendency of people to have “relationships” online. I myself have to periodically remind myself that I don’t actually know Laura. I am careful when I describe conversations, information that I get from here to say, “a blogger I read”, but I can see how it would be tempting to skip that step and say “someone I know”, which then creates false impressions that could lead you to catfish.
LikeLike
Columbo is the best thing to watch while feeding a baby. It’s interesting and the baby grows up to find Peter Falk’s voice soothing.
LikeLike
The crazy thing is that I do have good friends I met online and see often, but I’ve been online seriously since 1992.
I talk about this kind of stuff with my daughter all the time now that she does Tumblr.
LikeLike
Well the relationship sorting might have something to do with views on sex and abortion. People who don’t believe in abortion probably don’t want to wind up in a situation where their significant other is pressuring them to have one, for starters. Therefore, it probably helps to date people who are similarly anti-abortion. That and I assume gender roles might explain the sorting by political party. At some point in a relationship, people start talking about the future and presumably women who want to stay home might be more likely to be Republican as would the men who would seek a stay at home wife.
I would assume that the conversation where the woman says something like ‘yes, I would expect you to move for my career’ might end a lot of relationships between people of opposing political parties.
LikeLike
“At some point in a relationship, people start talking about the future and presumably women who want to stay home might be more likely to be Republican as would the men who would seek a stay at home wife.”
And there’s the opposite preference as well–some men are determined to have their wives work and earn, no matter what.
LikeLike
In addition to geography and religion, race and ethnicity influence dating and marriage choices, and also correlate with political views. In fact, if you control for those factors, I wonder if political views have any independent effect on the assortative mating phenomenon. Most of the people I know never talk about politics–as in, I don’t know the political affiliation of most of my friends–and I really don’t recall ever discussing politics when I was dating.
LikeLike
“I really don’t recall ever discussing politics when I was dating.
Ditto, not in any great depth, and certainly not partisan political issues (we were both in grad school in the humanities, so it was like a sensory deprivation chamber for current events). I knew that my future husband’s parents had been Solidarity organizers and were big anti-communists.
LikeLike
wants me to do XYZ in bed
People should at least be willing to try XYZ- they might like it, and it’s silly to rule it out w/o at least giving it a few tries.
I’ve had friendships mostly done over the internet (not romantic ones, except times when I was apart from my wife for various reasons for long periods)but then, I’ve also had important friendships that were largely conducted via actual physical letters, too. Those were more interesting, in some ways.
LikeLike
“People should at least be willing to try XYZ- they might like it, and it’s silly to rule it out w/o at least giving it a few tries.”
But if your religion forbids XYZ and your spouse knew that going into the relationship?
LikeLike
But if your religion forbids XYZ and your spouse knew that going into the relationship?
They probably didn’t think you really believed in such stuff. In most cases, they’d be right.
LikeLike
I don’t understand how people can date without discussing politics. I’m not talking the occasional date, but once you see someone a few times, isn’t there some discussion beyond small talk? On one of our first dates, my husband and I saw Roger and Me. A few weeks later we saw Do the Right Thing. Politics were discussed.
LikeLike
“I don’t understand how people can date without discussing politics. I’m not talking the occasional date, but once you see someone a few times, isn’t there some discussion beyond small talk? On one of our first dates, my husband and I saw Roger and Me. A few weeks later we saw Do the Right Thing. Politics were discussed.”
The first date I went on with my future husband was to Burnt by the Sun (Russia, 1994). That’s kind of political, I suppose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_by_the_Sun
LikeLike
I don’t know, I guess I’m really surprised that this group of intelligent and politically aware people never talked about politics while dating. Things happen in the world, and you notice them and talk about them, right? You *stop* doing that because you’re dating?
LikeLike
I was in a political science graduate program. Not talking about politics was the only way to be not talking about work.
LikeLike
“Things happen in the world, and you notice them and talk about them, right? You *stop* doing that because you’re dating?”
Nah, it was graduate school. My program was ferocious (be responsible for 1000 years of Russian literature!) and I was living in a virtually current events-free bubble (although I do remember a bit of the Clinton impeachment drama). I had a classmate who would more or less haze me for wasting time when he caught me with a newspaper.
I have started having a go at Catfish. I’m finding some of the perps surprisingly sympathetic.
LikeLike
My program was ferocious (be responsible for 1000 years of Russian literature!)
You had to learn old slavonic? There really wasn’t much literature for about 500 years of that anyway, was there?
The people I knew in grad school paid a lot of attention to current affairs, I think.
The first date I went on with my future husband was to Burnt by the Sun
I can imagine going to see that, thinking it would be good, since Mikhalkov had made some good movies, but that one was a stinker- so didactic, and his manneristic style really out of control.
LikeLike
I have relatives in “mixed” marriages, except they’re in a religious tradition which skews highly conservative, so I guess being a Democrat in the first place is a little weird. Since the moderate wing of the Republican party has become Democratic, I wouldn’t be surprised if conservative Democrats are with “moderate” Republicans where in the past the same people would have been a moderate and conservative Republican.
My family has a range of political views, except they’re Northern European political views mapped onto the American landscape, so they skew from the pretty far American left to the very far American left, although with enormous differences that get lost in translation.* Talking about American politics doesn’t get very far, but discussing, say, which countries should be in the Eurozone or Muslim immigration to Europe can create sparks.
*An exception is my mother’s current partner, who is a Finnish immigrant and Republican. I think it’s a combo of confusing the Finnish right with the American right, and also leftover anti-Sovietism (his father was a Winter War hero, and had very strong feelings about the Russians). He and my mother don’t talk American politics, but they do talk Euro politics a bit.
LikeLike
“You had to learn old slavonic? There really wasn’t much literature for about 500 years of that anyway, was there?”
Yeah. We had a course in Old Church Slavonic and a church in Old Russian Grammar (I may be getting the course titles wrong) and probably a stand-alone course on medieval literature, although mercifully we were allowed to read the texts in English. Medieval Russian lit runs right up to the 17th century. It’s all rather fuzzy right now, but medieval Russian lit is mainly stuff like saints’ lives and chronicles, with a very few things like Igor’s Campaign (Wikipedia reminds me that that’s late 12th century). The medieval MA exam was the easiest one and then of course the 19th century exam was a monster.
“I can imagine going to see that, thinking it would be good, since Mikhalkov had made some good movies, but that one was a stinker- so didactic, and his manneristic style really out of control.”
I was looking it up last night and I made a discovery.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Believe it or not, they did a 2010 sequel of Burnt by the Sun which sounds utterly terrible. How, you might ask, could they do a sequel, seeing as how all the main characters die at the end in the first film? Well, the sequel resurrects the three main characters in order to send the hero back to fight for the fatherland during WWII. I’m not making this up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_by_the_Sun_2
LikeLike
Let’s not forget the election year consequences of a politically mixed marriage in a family with combined finances. Each spouse gives the same amount and it cancels out exactly. You could have the same results in off-years, too–she gives to Handgun Control, Inc., he gives to the NRA, etc.
Then there’s the whole vegetarian/non-vegetarian thing, which is also a relationship killer.
LikeLike
Making you learn old slavonic, and old Church Russia, sounds merely cruel. My impression was that not even teachers of Russian literature in Russia bother learning it.
I knew of the sequel to _Burnt by the Sun_, but by that point had almost zero interest in new work by Mikhailkov. (His remamke of 12 angry men was not all that bad, though, I do have to admit- not a real improvement on the original, but not bad.) In general I think he’s a better actor than director, and better when directed by others (such as his brother.) I’ve you’ve not seen _Maria’s Lovers_, you should- I think that was a movie clearly meant to be set in Russia, w/ Mikhailkov playing the role that Bud Cort played. He would have been good in it.
LikeLike
“Making you learn old slavonic, and old Church Russia, sounds merely cruel. My impression was that not even teachers of Russian literature in Russia bother learning it.”
We only had to learn the rules and the conjugations and be able to translate texts into English (gospels, primarily), rather than actively translating from English to OCS, so it wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds. There is a lot of linguistic value in studying OCS and Old Russian grammar, because a lot of “irregularities” in modern Russian (like consonant mutations–t turning into ch, g turning into zh, etc.) turn out to be just bits of OCS. My OCS teacher said that when you study the other Slavic languages (for instance Polish) you wind up encountering a lot of OCS features that have disappeared in Russian. OCS is sort of a Slavic family reunion.
LikeLike
I suspect this pattern varies by town. I can think of many “mixed” marriages here. It would be interesting to see how the intensity of concentration of single-party marriages varies by geography. I also suspect there are more mixed marriages than you suspect. If you’re blue in a red town, or red in a blue town, you don’t automatically start political discussions.
Then again, party affiliation doesn’t track neatly with political leanings. In our state, one may be “unenrolled,” which could mean anything. It could mean a Democrat/Republican who doesn’t want to be called at home before election day.
LikeLike
There is a lot of linguistic value in studying OCS and Old Russian grammar…
Plus, it will help you understand anybody you encounter who has spent the past 80 years hiding in Siberia.
LikeLike
MH, a friend of mine had an experience pretty much on point for that. His dad had been a relatively high official in the quisling government of Ukraine, fled back to West with the Nazis as they retreated. He grew up in US. So when he visited Ukraine as an adult, he was Rip Van Winkel, using slang no one had heard for years, unable to deal with neologisms, etc. Plus the fear that people would figure out who he was (or at least, who his dad was).
LikeLike
“Each spouse gives the same amount and it cancels out exactly. ” Well, except for the effectiveness of the campaign’s use of the money.
“If you’re blue in a red town, or red in a blue town, you don’t automatically start political discussions.”
I’d like to know if this is symmetric, or if conservatives/republicans are less likely to talk politics. I have generally been a blue in a blue environment, and every environment I’ve been in has been steeped in politics. After a year of college, my roommate and I knew enough about each others political preferences that we, without much discussion, plastered our door with political signs (in honor of her first presidential election). The republicans (in a minority mind you) in our blue environments have been unwilling to talk about politics (mostly, even when we thought we were being tolerant and wanted to hear their opinions, though I’m not making a strong case that we were tolerant).
Are republicans less likely to discuss politics than democrats even in red environments? Is Republican v Democratic discussion kind of like Western v Asians discussing incomes and house prices and money? (It takes a high level of assimilation before Asians stop asking how much your house cost), because such discussions are not considered private (the way I feel about politics).
LikeLike
I don’t recall people muting their politics when I was in college. I mean, in dorm room conversations; obviously there’s no point in arguing with a professor, since everyone’s purpose was to get the possible grade with the least possible work. And my daughter and her friends seem to talk politics freely and frequently. She is at Wake Forest, where the student body seems about evenly divided politically, as best I can tell.
LikeLike
I don’t know, but it’s an interesting question. My sister’s partner is some kind of Republican (my impression is that he’s the libertarianish gay-friendly and so on type), and I’d kind of love to grill him on politics, but I’m not going to bring it up first because anything I see him at, my family has him way outnumbered and I don’t want him to feel threatened. (We’re intense enough already — I like him, and I think he likes us, but he’s wound-up like a longtailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs when he’s at family events.)
LikeLike
“obviously there’s no point in arguing with a professor, since everyone’s purpose was to get the possible grade with the least possible work. ”
*sigh*
LikeLike
Are you going to take off points because he left out “best”?
LikeLike
1. Not everybody has “politics” as their favorite hobby. I spend entire days, sometimes even weeks, not thinking about politics. It would not be at all surprising for me to date someone for six months or more without talking about politics–in fact, I’ve done that at least once. It wasn’t anybody I’d want to marry, mind, and I knew that at the time.
2. Some people are more tolerant than others. My husband’s politics occasionally annoy me (where they differ from mine) but it’s his conscience and his vote; I don’t feel the need for us to agree on everything in order to be happy in our relationship, and he feels the same way about me. This works because we each respect each other’s experience, values, and opinions, and because we are each certain enough of our convictions not to feel threatened when somebody we like and respect has a different opinion.
3. I believe people who aren’t progressive/left politically choose to stay out of political discussions that are started by progressive/left politically people. But then I live in a blue town. I work in a very blue office; there’s one woman whose politics are right of mine in most areas (she’s anti-abortion, for example) and she is constantly complaining to me about how the lefties are (a) ignorant of what conservatives actually want and (b) dismissive and ridiculing of any opinion that doesn’t match their own. Of course it’s mostly our bosses doing the talking.
I will point out that the lefties in my office talk about a lot of things that they get wrong (e.g., “All the right-wing blogs are talking about XYZ” and then I ask whether they actually read any right-wing blogs–because I do, and they’re not talking about XYZ at all–they say no, they got it from some lefty site), and do a lot of “group identification and bonding” talk (like, “How could anyone even want to own a gun?” to each other when they all know I own a gun and they could just ask me, but no, the purpose is not to do research, it’s to exchange the secret club handshake together).
LikeLike
And lots of graduate-level English programs make their students learn a certain amount of Old English. To say nothing of how much Middle English is required, what with Chaucer and friends.
Even for my undergrad German degree, we had to read some medieval German, though I always suspected it was easier for us second-language German speakers to deal with old variants of the language than it would be for native speakers.
Learning Polish before Russian has left me with a tendency to put the stress on the penultimate syllable, unless I am paying attention. I wonder what quirks going in the other direction would have done. (I should perhaps hasten to add that my level of Polish is officially “mostly forgotten” and my level of Russian is “extremely basic,” but the quirks are still there.)
LikeLike
Kai,
Nicely said.
Doug said:
“Learning Polish before Russian has left me with a tendency to put the stress on the penultimate syllable, unless I am paying attention. I wonder what quirks going in the other direction would have done.”
I went the other direction, and I suspect that omitting the present tense of “to be” would be a likely mistake. Misusing “vy” in places where Poles would use “pan” or “pani” is another possible. (I think there’s a Russian character in the novel-in-verse Pan Tadeusz who makes the latter mistake.)
It’s been a long time for me, too. I was planning to get back together with my local Russian tutor soon, but she’s a graduate student and she’s having twins!
LikeLike
Kai said: “Not everybody has “politics” as their favorite hobby. ”
Food is not my “favorite hobby” or even any hobby, yet I talk about it every day.
“how the lefties are (a) ignorant of what conservatives actually want”
What do conservatives actually want?
LikeLike
Wendy, just to be clear, I don’t endorse, I merely report. Whether there could be a system where (i) students are actually more interested in learning than their grades or (ii) professors do not, faced with two papers of equivalent quality, give higher grades to the one with which they agree, I don’t know. Probably not, after the fall.
LikeLike
“What do conservatives actually want?”
Freedom, justice, equal treatment under the law, protection of private property (i.e. no more Kelos), prosperity, sustainable levels of government operations and spending, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc. That would be what I want from the government. From the people, I’d like prudence, bourgeois virtue, generosity and a commitment to family and community. I’m probably missing a number of items, but that’s a start.
Kai?
LikeLike
One of the worst times in our marriage was when my spouse suddenly went through a conservative period. It was so not who he was or we were, almost more than the politics. He got over it.
We actually met because of politics. We were at a party. He asked if he could get me a beer. I said “anything but Coors.” He replied “You have good politics.” We moved in together 3 days later (not kidding). That was 27 years ago.
Oh, and if I were dating again, I think politics would play a role. Your view on the world shapes so much of who you are and what you do. It’s important to me.
LikeLike
I got a higher grade on an essay question answer my teacher disagreed with (on Abraham Lincoln and the civil war, so not on a hot political or ideological question). So I don’t think that agreement is a prerequisite. Now, some ideas are just wrong, making it impossible to argue coherently on the other side,
LikeLike
Kai,
Very well said. I too rarely talk politics and actually find people who repeatedly drag politics into conversations annoying.
It doesn’t bother me if someone disagrees with me politically (unless they start calling me names – then I just think they are jerks.) I think disagreements mostly stem from variations in the weight we put on different aspects of an issue(how much do you value individual freedom (say buying a big gulp) vs collective spending) and not because one side is stupid or evil. (Of course, I think people who consider one side stupid or evil to be rather narrow minded and sheltered within an echo chamber.)
LikeLike
Thanks, AmyP. Wendy and AmyP – I’m not a conservative! I’m a classical liberal with libertarian leanings; my politics are largely shaped by having grown up mostly very poor, in chaos, and having spent my formative (childhood and adolescence) years more in the drug dealers/thieves community than the middle-class law-abiding school-going intact family community. (I’ll be more specific if asked.) But my conservative friends mostly want the government to leave them alone to make their own choices and suffer the consequences, and to not tax them so much that they can’t make a life without taking benefits from the government–and not to provide so much support to others that government infantilizes them instead of encouraging growth into contributing members of society. Of course that’s what my mostly-libertarian friends want, too.
LikeLike
“I went the other direction, and I suspect that omitting the present tense of “to be” would be a likely mistake. Misusing “vy” in places where Poles would use “pan” or “pani” is another possible. (I think there’s a Russian character in the novel-in-verse Pan Tadeusz who makes the latter mistake.)”
I can see that about the tenses. I was taught that using “ja” was generally bad manners in Polish, and that really you should omit pronouns if the subject was clear from the conjugation of the verb. Odd that I didn’t find it peculiar that Russian omitted the verb instead of the pronoun. Variations on a theme, I suppose.
LikeLike