If there’s one thing you can be sure of, it’s that in a few months you’ll be inundated with news with headlines like this:
“She’s a liberal democrat – maybe a communist! – can I take her home to meet my parents?”
“I just married a conservative, and my friends left me.”
“I just married a liberal – her friends let me pay the bill, but they still hate me.”
“I’m a libertarian, so will I ever find someone?”
What would we do without these political biology stories in our Sunday lifestyle editions?
How can we live without counseling centers that tranquil the growing panic over America’s political mating rituals?
You’ve seen them. They’re about the hand-wringing over threatening relationships between men and women who are ideologically opposed.
They often involve guilt, a liberal woman dating a paleo-conservative and not knowing how to break the terrible news to her friends. They’re going to throw me out of the book club!
And sometimes these are not stories of forbidden political love, but disgusting and modest boasts about how she married a conservative out of pity and was surprised that he treated her with respect and knew how to employ a knife and fork.
Don’t worry, she’ll dump him and run off with some Bernie Bro before 2020.
Whether you like it or not, in the coming months, such topics will be relentlessly pushed at you – in the same way that stories about Bitcoin and Esperanto were pushed at you – despite your loudest inner cries.
Your eyes will skim over them a bit. Talk show hosts will employ them as programming fodder. Can you date a Republican? Can you marry a Democrat without a prenup?
We will soon realize that our species will not be on this earth long. Because what is natural is natural. And allowing politics to distract you from gazing into her eyes and holding her hand is unnatural.
But politics doesn’t care about what comes naturally. Politics has a mission.
Politicians may argue about tax cuts or Russian spies in our closets, but with the 2018 midterm elections approaching, the socio-political herd will intensify. And shame is an incentive for ruthless political herdsmen.
So there will be more studies, stories, and polls asking, “Can I date a Republican without getting sick?” or explaining, “How to hide your Democratic lover from your family,” and so on.
And because the media is so left-wing (don’t even try to pretend otherwise, it’s like you’re a die-hard science denier), most stories about political connections will reflect a certain antipathy toward “those people,” meaning Republicans.
So gather around, let me put on my favorite cardigan, fill my pipe, pour myself a mulled wine, and I’ll tell you about the ancient days.
In those days, “mixed marriages” had nothing to do with politics. They meant Episcopalian women dating Methodist men.
Later came “intermarriages,” with Italians marrying Irish, Greeks marrying Jews, blacks marrying whites, and the most arduous type of intermarriage was that of Sox fans marrying Cubs fans.
Now the division is political because politics is our recent secular American church. There is already ample evidence of this. Read or listen to the media hysteria. It sounds like a crusade.
Each sect or denomination has its own catechism, dogma, priests (politicians) and strict bishops (experts) who protect the faithful from the temptations of strange libertarians.
On the NPR News website—yes, I go there to find out what liberals really think—I found an article about dating sites for politicians, one for Republicans, the other for liberal Democrats.
“There’s more activity now than ever,” said the head of a liberal dating site. “I knew liberals would find solace only in each other’s arms.” The conservative guy on the dating site sounded the same.
Don’t ask me for statistics. The Internet is full of surveys. Some say nearly half of Americans wouldn’t date someone with the opposite political views. Others say newborn Democrats don’t want newborn Republicans in the same dorm. Or at least I’ve heard that on talk shows, so it must be somewhat true.
If this research is true (and I don’t care right now), then anyone who lets politics interfere with romance is probably too stupid to raise children and should be chemically altered for the good of all.
Some of the more absurd dating advice I’ve seen involves talking about your political views on the second or third date “to get it over with.”
Are you going to talk about tax policy on a date? Loser.
Thankfully, not everyone thinks that way. I bet there’s some newborn Republican college student reading The Nation right now to get his head around the key words so he can date that girl from Madison with the gigantic brown eyes.
And in the fall, some newborn, liberal woman will probably be going back to school in Yellow Springs, Ohio, thinking about gender studies but also about the boy who shocked her with his National Review.
Politics is nothing compared to love, but sometimes you can’t see that with all the noise it makes to make people feel guilty.
Betty and I have been married for over 30 years. She was a contemporary dancer marching in parades without nuclear weapons. I admired Ronald Reagan. We are still together. We still hold hands.
Good thing there was no social media back then. She could have been embarrassed about our second date.
