Politics Isn't Why You're Single

Against a new self-defeating narrative on the right

When I was in graduate school, I was talking to a fellow academic who told me that she was studying governance in Somalia. My response was something along the lines of “Oh yes, they’ve got quite the capacity for that.” She gave a kind of half laugh-half gasp, one that made clear that my racist joke had won her over, and we ended up going out.¹

I sometimes think of this story when I see claims being made that political polarization is making it harder for young people to form relationships with the opposite sex. Here’s one example in The Atlantic, which points to survey data on Americans becoming less likely to say they would date or marry across ideological lines.

Liberals are an absolute majority among young single women, which might lead one to think that things are particularly hard out there for conservative men. If they attend an elite university or are in an urban professional setting, their prospects must be even worse.

Whenever I see arguments like this, I think they reveal the degree to which people really don’t understand how any of this works.