Three dates and Caroline, 30, still wasn’t sure about her match with Hinge. He was sexy, nice, and had a Silicon Valley meets surfer vibe – and as a result, she worried, too good to be true. “I made one or two vague comments about dreading election season and just wishing it would end, hoping to learn his political leanings,” she says. “He didn’t take the bait.”

It turned out to be a simple “how was your weekend?” » a text message after their first meeting which got her the response she feared. He shared that he spent three hours waiting in line for former President Trump’s rally in New York. “That was pretty cool!” he wrote.

The budding relationship quickly fell apart, making liberal Caroline one of one in four Americans who say they have suffered a break due to political incompatibility, according to a survey carried out in September by the dating app Flirtini. According to an Axios poll from October, half of generation Z lied to their loved ones about their voting choice. On dating apps, the most common way American couples are meeting nowmay encourage users to share their political views from the start, it’s not required – and some singles deliberately avoid airing their opinions.

The gender gap between male and female voters has almost never been more prevalent in the United States. Overall, young women became more liberal while men have remained relatively stable and topics like sex, birth control, and abortion are almost inevitably tied to relationships. A few days before the presidential election and abortion rights back on the ballot in 10 states, dating may seem especially difficult right now.

A liberal woman may see “Republican” on a potential date’s profile and swipe left without further investigation. To avoid such rapid judgment, some conservative and even moderate men choose not to disclose their politics from the outset. For many women, however, it represents another land mine in the war zone that is modern romance.

“My friends and I must be extremely vigilant dating apps”, » says Frances, a 29-year-old from Baltimore. If a person’s party affiliation isn’t listed, Frances will try to guess them based on clues in their photos and prompts, or even by looking them up on Google and LinkedIn. “It’s just one more thing to think about besides trying not to get murdered.”

“It was at that point, ‘Who did I just sleep with?'”

Frances, a Democrat, has been burned before. Twice, in fact. Both times, her boyfriend’s right-wing politics were brought up. a few months after the start of the relationship, both citing the economy as the reason for their support. She suspects that her second partner, with whom she broke up in August after eight months together, would not have divulged this information if they had not had a few cocktails.

“Part of me kind of took a break, and it changed my perception of him,” she says. Ultimately, it wasn’t a problem for her, in part because they didn’t have long-term compatibility — he doesn’t want kids, and she might.

Although he became a strong supporter of Planned Parenthood after the clinic gave Frances, then unemployed and uninsured, a year’s supply of free birth control pills, she says reproductive rights were not a political issue for him . “He never had to think about abortion because it doesn’t affect him personally,” Frances says. She told him that if Trump returned to office in 2025, it could mean a nationwide ban on abortion – something that could affect them both. “I don’t know if that’s a connection he made before I mentioned it.”

For other women, differences of political opinion are too big a bridge to lead the way. Rebecca, a 40-year-old Democrat from Massachusetts, went on a date with a man in 2018 and said there were “no red flags.” Although she didn’t directly ask him about politics, she is confident and well-educated, and figured that if he had been anti-feminist, they wouldn’t get along as well as before. Later, the two had sex.

As he walked around her apartment, he asked her what she thought were the biggest issues facing feminists today. “I talked about affordable child care and reproductive health and went for my little soap box,” she says. “And he said something like, ‘I think it’s all these crazy women on the Internet who hate men.'”

Rebecca felt cheated – as if he had been waiting after having sex to reveal his true values. “It was like, ‘Who did I just sleep with?’ “, she said. Before leaving, he took the used condom and wrapped it in a Kleenex to take with him. When she asked him why, he said he had heard of women impregnating themselves with discarded semen and then suing the men they had one-night stands with to get child support. their children.

“It was like once he had what he wanted, he could say whatever he wanted,” she says.

“I would rather have a slightly worse economic situation than die from a preventable pregnancy-related cause.”

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

So when he came across his current girlfriend’s profile, he swiped right — even though his bio specifically told Trump voters to do the opposite. It took about two months for the problem to surface. He revealed his past and his intention to step down on Election Day. “We discussed both of our beliefs and some things we agreed on, some things we didn’t agree on,” he says. “We’ve been dating for about four months and it’s going great.”

Due to the polarization of today’s political climate, many people may mistakenly believe that a person’s political party is directly linked to their values. Although Mark previously voted for Trump, he and his girlfriend are both pro-choice and support same-sex marriage. He recently met his sister, who is liberal and married to another woman, and says her political views were never discussed. “Respecting these boundaries is all I can ask of potential in-laws,” he says.

For Frances, however, some people in her life have been critical. “When I told a friend about our conversation and tried to explain why he leaned the way he did – where he grew up, the environment he grew up in, the exposure he didn’t have. didn’t have to deal with other cultures and other people – she called me out and I said I was making excuses for her,” she said. “She was right.

Both sides appear to resent the other for their approach. The climate is so tense that Mark says approaching 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 economic situation than die from a preventable pregnancy-related cause,” Frances says. “The guys have the privilege of being able to stop this.”