Media coverage of legislation like Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill or Texas's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth have brought national attention to state policy. On the surface, very few of these recent high-profile issues are directly about relationships.

The case of Masterpiece Cake Shop vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission did not question whether the male couple could get married. It only declared that a local baker could refuse to bake them a custom cake based on the owner's religious beliefs.

Inequalities in state-level protections for fundamental rights and freedoms (e.g., housing protection, employment security) complicate the lives of LGBTQ people, generating sources of stress that heterosexual and cisgender people do not share. It is one form of what psychologists would call minority stress (Brooks, 1981), and decades of research document its adverse effects on sexual and gender minority people (Flentje et al., 2020; Hoy-Ellis, 2023).

In just the past 15 years (Hatzenbuehler, 2009), psychologists have proposed that this happens for three reasons.

In their recent paper, Starks, Hillesheim, Stephenson, and Robles (Starks et al., 2023) examined the association between policy and relationship status in a large dataset of 7,705 cisgender sexual minority men recruited across the U.S. from dating and social networking applications.

I break down the first of their key findings: State-level policy is correlated with whether or not sexual minority men are in a........

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