Comment by gsf_emergency_2
7 days ago
This gets more complicated when you replace "friend" with "spouse" (/partner) because there comes up the problem of consensuality in unavoidably unpleasant unavoidable decision-making..
(Assuming one marries for "love")
I believe having a partner with directly opposing political views is unsustainable. Partners with adjacent political views may be manageable, or even preferable to a fully aligned one, but those with directly opposing views are a constant source of drama and tension in your life. Political views often reflect deeply held values and beliefs.
>> those with directly opposing views are a constant source of drama and tension in your life
I don't think this is true at all. The vast majority of people largely ignore politics, cast their vote, and move on with their lives. It's completely fine to have different political views if you both act like normal reasonable people. We see a lot of the 'kick, scream, and cry' types on both side in the media. In the real world, most people have more important things to be getting on with.
> It's completely fine to have different political views if you both act like normal reasonable people.
Yes, this is true, you can have different political views and still be friends/lovers/partners/whatver.
What parent said though was "directly opposing political views", which I'd also agree with is inviting trouble, as it'll leak out in constant tensions and frictions. Simple things like "We shouldn't drive as much as we currently do" can lead to heavy argumentation if the underlying reasoning cannot be understood by both parties.
In real life, people might not speak about parties or political figures, but their everyday actions are driven by their values and beliefs, which also ends up reflected by who they vote for. Politics is everywhere, even where people don't speak of it directly.
2 replies →
Political views can change over time though. It can be unsustainable in the way of "one or both people moderates their political views".
That will leave a large group of people without any partners, since men and women vote very differently.
Then so be it, if your views keep you from finding a partner then maybe you should start thinking about compromise rather than falling deeper into extremism.
But, this is also why one political party in the US tends to vote against things like no fault divorce and other questionable policies regarding womens rights.
Note that various surveys report young women and young men diverging a lot more politically. Partly because women's rights have become so politicised.
>Partly because women's rights have become so politicised.
What is the womans suffrage movement?
I may be extrapolating on a single statement too far, but I do feel that you are missing a huge chunk of history regarding all the rights women (at least regarding the US) did not have.
Womans rights have been political for the last 200 years if not longer.
> Partly because women's rights have become so politicised.
That's a hand-wavy way of saying that a core pillar of one of your parties is to take away the rights of an entire gender.
Imagine describing 1940s Germany and saying "Ethnicity has become so politicized these days. I'm just interested in nationalizing the auto industry"
That would only be true if words weren't perverted for political leverage. Sexist used to mean "women can't do that" now sexist means "a woman experienced an unpleasant thing, and it carries more significance because of her gender, and if you dare dispute this you can expect to be cancelled".
6 replies →
What do you mean by women’s rights? The difference in support for abortion by sex is trivial. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...
Probably not abortion. While rights never happen in a vacuum, it is usually framed as a matter of fetus rights.
How about a woman's right to equal employment opportunity? 67% of women are in favour of DEI, while most men (57%) take the opposing view. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-american...
The primary political parties are definitely catering to those sides.
Seeing a 3 point difference in the support for abortion between men and women is *wild* to me.
1 reply →
This trend is certainly one aspect of the explanation for the decline in the number of long-term relationships.
The other being that once women have largescale representation in the workforce, can open bank accounts and credit cards on their own, and can support themselves financially, one of the key pressures to marry is removed. Once there was no fault divorce and women did not need to prove why they needed to divorce, one of the key pressures to stay married is removed.
7 replies →
It could also be the opposite causality. Because people aren't getting into intimate relationships as much (looking out for each other, caring deeply about an individual of the opposite gender), the two groups are naturally diverging into preferring "what's best for ME".
I think the political split between genders is MUCH stronger for singles. It's kind of a trap actually.
Also white/black, straight/gay, poor/wealthy etc.
We can find hundreds of dividing lines if we insist.
Ah yes, one sex is diverging to the other side because they are wrong on MY pet issue. (This is not grounded in reality)
Marrying purely for "love" and ignoring core values, mindset compatibility, what they want in life and so on is a recipe for disaster, or at least some deep regrets down the line. I haven't seen nor heard about a single success story a decade or two down the line. Whom to marry is probably the most important decision in our lives. One of reasons why marrying early is too risky - people still massively change till at least 25-30, it cal still work but chances are smaller.
Its a typical junior mistake to marry for love/lust and not think a bit on top of that, in this case I blame parents who don't have some hard talks with their kids explaining them not-so-rosy parts of adult existence. Like initial enormous physical attraction wanes over time, kids crush most of remaining, and what still remains are 2 people and how they treat relationship and each other with that lust tuned down eventually to 0, under various, often not so nice situations. But our parent's generation didn't figure it all out, in contrary the amount of actually nice relationships in higher ages ain't that high.
I didn't have such prep talk neither, nor do I know anybody who had, and had to figure it all on my own via rough trials and failures till finally figuring myself and women out, and then happy marriage (so far, hard knock on the wood). Its like expecting everybody to be sophisticated engineer, learning them to count on fingers and throwing them out and good luck, I am sure you'll figure it out eventually. Some do, some don't. Most don't I'd say.
This is the sort of thing they should teach in schools. English literature is a good venue for it.
> Whom to marry is probably the most important decision in our lives.
That's putting way too much pressure on it. Find someone you feel like you could spend the rest of your life with? Marry them, see what happens. If you get a divorce, so be it, it's not the end of the world and there is plenty of others out there, even if you're "damaged goods" or whatever your worry is.
I feel like the pressure people put around marriage it what makes it so damaging in the first place, people feeling like they have to marry in the first place, or if they're married, they need to try to stick together more than some couple who isn't married, and so on.
Just make a decision and learn from your mistakes in case you fuck up, it really isn't more complicated than that.
I'm going to assume you're a man and probably have a little less experience here than the average woman does.
This said, I am a man too, but a large part of my career was supporting lawyers and court systems, including family court systems.
Choosing the wrong partner is one of the biggest risks you take in your life, especially for a woman. This is one of those things that can easily lead to you being bankrupt with nothing. This can lead to you being abused or raped. You can end up with a child that you did not want to have. You can end up dead.
With states pushing to revoke things like no fault divorce (and women being the primary initiators of divorce) it's not hard see the traps women lived in the past coming back.
Then add the strongly religious connotations marriage has in the US and you quickly see why this is a rollercoaster that emotions and politics are not going to be removed from.
2 replies →
> That's putting way too much pressure on it. Find someone you feel like you could spend the rest of your life with? Marry them, see what happens. If you get a divorce, so be it, it's not the end of the world
This is quite bad advice, because divorce can be devastating financially.
1 reply →
Politics feels like an integral part of finding a partner nowadays. Which makes sense—values are important to agree upon.
The width of the spectrum of political views for 65% of people used to be relatively narrow.
That's increasingly not the case.
Capitalism "Choice is good!"
Politics "Not like that, not like that!"
I don't believe that political views used to be narrow, I believe the political views you were allowed to actually express were much more narrow and everything else was repressed.
Really depends on the region. There's lots of opinions/ideas/directions/parties in many countries with lots of overlap. In the US... I'm not sure how relationships, that actually talk about things, can survive if partners have different party preferences.
[dead]