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By Jessica Grose
Opinion Writer
I read through all 274 responses to a questionnaire I put out about how politics affects the dating lives of Americans under 30, and I took note of the fact that quite a few respondents used economic terminology when describing their romantic experiences. The term “scarcity,” in particular, came up more than once as a factor in dating experiences.
A very liberal man in New York who said he doesn’t even consider dating people who put “moderate” in their dating profiles said, “It’s probably unfair, but with such a deep left-leaning dating pool, there’s no scarcity mind-set forcing us to interact and test that assessment.” A very liberal woman in Denver had the opposite perspective because she felt that liberal men were scarce: “I was in a pretty bad relationship, but I stayed in it so long in part because I worried I wouldn’t find another man who is a Democrat,” she said.
I started thinking that when it comes to politics, people tend to be rational daters within their own romantic markets — and that when it comes to dating, the total number of liberals versus conservatives in the country doesn’t matter as much as where they are distributed, and whether there is a mismatch in smaller geographic areas.
Which is to say: If you live in a big city that has lots of people who are politically like-minded, you can afford to filter out the people who don’t align with you very closely. If you live in a smaller or more politically mixed environment, you can’t afford to be so choosy without severely restricting your dating pool. In Brooklyn, for example, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans about eight to one. So for daters in my own liberal bubble, it doesn’t matter nearly as much that in the country overall, men are more likely to be conservative — a New Yorker is unlikely to be dating someone who currently lives in Alabama or Wyoming.
(It’s worth noting here that some political scientists have pushed back on the notion that the political divide between young men and women is growing in the first place — there is evidence that both men and women under 30 have become more liberal over time.)
I ran my theory by a few academics who’ve studied politics and dating to see if there was any research that might explain or give more weight to my observations, with the understanding that the Times readers who replied to my questionnaire aren’t a demographically representative sample. The long and short of it is that in general, when people are looking for serious relationships, they want partners who are similar to them in a variety of dimensions — it’s called homophily.
But politics is just one area of potential homophily. Education level, religion, attractiveness (however you define that) and race are among the factors that people consider when looking for a mate. It’s possible that if you’re dating in a market where political sameness is tough to find, or if you just don’t care very much about politics in the first place, you might put greater weight on other factors.
Neil Malhotra, a professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who has published research on political homophily and online dating, said that he and his co-author Gregory Huber found that while shared politics do make someone more likely to engage with someone else on an online dating platform, the importance of politics is “much, much smaller compared to things like age and religion and things like that. And it’s smaller than education,” he said. With the important caveats that Malhotra and Huber were using data from people who were active online daters in the year 2010 — a pretty long time ago for both the political and online dating landscapes — and narrowed their scope to those seeking opposite-sex partners, they found that politics are “not clearly dominating all the normal things people select on,” he said.
There’s also a way in which online dating specifically may influence people’s ideas of the political leanings of their particular dating market. Casey Klofstad, the chair of political science at the University of Miami, described politics as “plumage” for online daters. “Choosing to display that connotes that you value it and that you are seeking to attract like-minded folks,” Klofstad said. “And the folks that do that are the ones that are more politically engaged on average.”
If you meet someone in real life, unless he signals his politics via a T-shirt slogan or a bumper sticker, you probably won’t know his beliefs until you go on a couple of dates, at which point you may be willing to overlook some political differences as long as they don’t conflict with your most deeply held values. For example, many liberals and liberal-leaning people who responded to my questionnaire said they would date a conservative as long as he or she wasn’t a Trump voter. Likewise, a few conservatives said they would be open to dating a liberal as long as he or she wasn’t anti-Israel.
More than partisan politics, I’d argue that the more profound change we see today is increased sorting for education and earnings.
Using data from Denmark (they note that analogous data wasn’t available for the United States), researchers from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Aarhus University and the University of Michigan found that Danes were more deliberately sorting themselves for both education and ambition, which they defined as choosing careers associated with high wage growth over time. “The researchers established that self-sorting into equal-ambition couples increased by about 25 percent between 1980 and 2018,” according to Katie Gilbert, who summarized the study’s findings for the Kellogg website.
There are comparable dynamics in the United States. Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, analyzed data from the General Social Survey and shared it with me over email. He found that in the 1970s, among people who took the survey and had a graduate degree, “39 percent of them married someone with a high school diploma or less. Fifty-seven percent married someone with at least a four-year degree. In the 2020s, among people with a graduate degree, just 19 percent married someone with a high school diploma or less, and 78 percent married someone with a college degree.” In a paper published in 2012, Klofstad and his co-author Rindy Anderson found that “individuals of both sexes seek mates with an income similar to their own, regardless of local resource pressures.”
Gen Z has become known for its general distrust of societal institutions, but it’s a generation still coming of age. I often wonder if the ugliness of our polarized landscape is having a moderating effect on the youngest among us, who see the rancor and division and want no part of it.
Though there is evidence of a liberal tilt among both millennials and Gen Z-ers, a new report from the Public Religion Research Institute found a marked difference between Gen Z adults and Gen Z teens: Gen Z teens are more moderate than Gen Z adults, and they’re also more likely to have no political affiliation. And the political gender gap among Gen Z teens is smaller than the political gender gap among Gen Z adults — 27 percent of teenage girls identify as liberal, as do 21 percent of teenage boys.
Maybe I’m an old romantic, but after spending a few weeks talking to 20-somethings who are dating around, I believe they’re going to find their people, as much as the generations before them ever did. All the people I talked to said they wanted to be in a serious, enduring relationship someday, even if they didn’t pine for permanent partnership in the near term. The process of being young and out there is always a messy one, and it’s easy to have rose-colored glasses in retrospect.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
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