Whoops, Did He Forget To Mention He’s A Republican?

Three dates in, and 30-year-old Caroline still wasn’t sure about her Hinge match. He was hot, kind, and had a Silicon-Valley-meets-surfer vibe — and therefore, she worried, too good to be true. “I made one or two vague comments about election season dread and just wanting it to be over, hoping to elicit his political leanings,” she says. “He didn’t take the bait.”

Turns out, it was a simple “how was your weekend?” text after their first hookup that got her the answer she had been fearing. He shared that he had spent three hours in line for former President Donald Trump’s rally in New York. “It was pretty cool!” he wrote.

The budding relationship quickly fizzled, making liberal Caroline among the 1 in 4 Americans who say they’ve suffered a breakup due to political incompatibility, per a September survey by the dating app Flirtini. According to an Axios poll from October, half of Gen Z has lied to people close to them about who they’re voting for. While dating apps, the most common way American couples meet now, can prompt users to share their political leanings up front, it’s not required — and some singles purposefully avoid broadcasting their views.

The gender gap between male and female voters has almost never been wider in the United States. As a whole, young women have become more liberal while men have remained relatively stable, and topics like sex, birth control, and abortion are almost inevitably intertwined with relationships. With the presidential election days away and abortion rights once again on the ballot in 10 states, dating can feel particularly fraught at the moment.

A liberal woman may see “Republican” on a potential date’s profile and swipe left without further investigation. In order to avoid such swift judgment, some conservative and even moderate men are choosing not to disclose their politics up front. For many women, however, it’s thrown yet another land mine into the war zone that is modern romance.

“My friends and I have to be so hypervigilant on dating apps,” says Frances, a 29-year-old from Baltimore. If a date’s party affiliation isn’t listed, Frances will try to guess based on clues from their photos and prompts, or even from searching them on Google and LinkedIn. “It’s just one more thing to think about on top of trying not to get murdered.”

“It was this moment of ‘Who did I just sleep with?’”

Frances, a Democrat, has been burned before. Twice, actually. Both times, her boyfriends’ right-leaning politics came up a few months into the relationship, with both citing the economy as the reason for their support. She suspects her second partner, whom she broke up with in August after eight months together, would not have volunteered that information if they hadn’t had a few cocktails.

“Part of me did kind of pause, and it changed my perception of him,” she says. Ultimately, it wasn’t a deal-breaker for her, partly because they didn’t have long-term compatibility — he doesn’t want kids, and she might.

Though he became a vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood after the clinic gave Frances, then unemployed and uninsured, a year’s worth of free birth control pills, she says reproductive rights were not a political issue for him. “He’s never had to think about abortion because it doesn’t personally affect him,” Frances says. She explained to him that were Trump to resume office in 2025, it could mean a nationwide abortion ban — something that might affect both of them. “I’m not sure if this is a connection that he had made prior to me bringing it up.”

For other women, clashing political views are a gap too big to bridge. Rebecca, a 40-year-old Democrat in Massachusetts, went on a date with a man back in 2018, and she said there were “no red flags.” While she didn’t ask him about politics directly, she’s confident and well-educated and figured if he was anti-feminist, they wouldn’t have gotten along as well as they did. The two later had sex.

As he was milling around her apartment after, he asked her what she thought the biggest issues facing feminists today were. “I said affordable child care and reproductive health and went on my little soapbox,” she says. “And he said something along the lines of ‘I think it’s all those crazy ladies on the Internet who hate men.’”

Rebecca felt duped — like he had waited until after they had sex to reveal his true values. “It was this moment of ‘Who did I just sleep with?’” she says. Before he left, he took the used condom and wrapped it in a Kleenex to take with him. When she asked why, he said he had heard that women were impregnating themselves with discarded sperm, and then suing the men they had one-night stands with for child support.

“It felt like once he had what he wanted, he could say whatever the hell he wanted to,” she says.

“I’d rather have a slightly worse economy than die of a preventable pregnancy-related cause.”

Mark, however, says he isn’t that conniving. Depending on the app’s options, he’ll select “apolitical” or “prefer not to say,” despite the fact that he’s voted red in the past three elections. (He says that he’s abstaining this year.) “I just don’t want my political views to define who I am as a person,” says the Midwestern 30-year-old. “The truth is I think you can have different political beliefs and still be friends or romantically involved with somebody.”

So when he came across his current girlfriend’s profile, he swiped right — even though her bio specifically told Trump voters to do the opposite. It took about two months for the issue to surface. He came clean about his past, as well as his plans to opt out on Election Day. “We discussed both of our beliefs, and some things we saw eye to eye on, some things we didn’t,” he says. “We’ve been dating now for about four months, and it’s going really well.”

Due to the polarizing state of today’s political climate, some people believe that a person’s political party is directly correlated with their values. While Mark had previously voted for Trump, he and his girlfriend are both pro-choice and support same-sex marriage. He recently met her sister, who is liberal and married to another woman, and says his politics never came up. “Respecting those boundaries is all I can ask for from potential in-laws,” he says.

For Frances, however, some people in her life were critical. “When I told a friend about our conversation and tried to explain why he might be leaning this way — where he grew up, the environment he was raised in, the exposure he hasn’t had to other cultures and people — she called me out and said I was making excuses for him,” she says. “She was right.”

Both sides seem to resent the other for their approach. The climate is so tense that Mark says bringing up politics too early is a “red flag,” while some women feel they have no choice for the same reason. “I’d rather have a slightly worse economy than die of a preventable pregnancy-related cause,” says Frances. “Guys have the privilege of being able to shut that off.”