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And after getting a look under the hood, the picture appeared much more complicated — and less dire than the “collapse of American marriage” contemplated by The Post — for young Americans and their potential future relationships. To start, what’s often ignored in the marriage panic discourse is that over the 10-year period from 2011 to 2021, the divorce rate has gone way down, as well. Also: Among the interviews that I read, there were a couple of L.G.B.T.Q. respondents; one in five members of Gen Z identifies that way, so the growing political divide between men and women in Gen Z may be less relevant.
Several respondents said that they had dated people with different political beliefs — a few were even married to people with different political views. And some said that any kind of extreme belief was itself a hindrance. “If they get cultish about things politically that’s also a very big turnoff,” said a 29-year-old politically moderate man.
That kind of response didn’t surprise me, having read the work of Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, two political scientists who wrote a guest essay for The Times in 2020 arguing that the vast majority of Americans, around 80 percent, “follow politics casually or not at all.” So when anyone, including those in the under-30 set, is looking for a partner, it’s quite possible that ideological differences or partisan politics don’t even come up early on in a relationship.
When asked what their dating deal-breakers are, most of the interviewees didn’t say politics — they talked about core values, keeping an open mind and treating other people with respect. More than one specifically said that a deal-breaker would be if, on a date, someone mistreated a waiter or waitress. One 22-year-old moderate woman said: “Pretty much my biggest thing is respect. Like, if you’re disrespectful to other people, that this is an instant no, whether you’re respectful to me or not. If you’re disrespectful to your family or if you’re just disrespectful to like, waitresses, that’s like a huge no, I don’t. I will not. I don’t like people shutting people down.” As my friend Anna Louie Sussman argued last year in a widely read Times guest essay, men’s lack of emotional sensitivity may loom as a larger issue.
The handful of people who mentioned political deal-breakers tended to be very liberal or very conservative — perhaps falling in that roughly 20 percent of Americans who follow politics closely. In that group, views on abortion did come up as a deal-breaker. As one liberal 21-year-old woman put it, “I think it absolutely is a deal-breaker because of course, when it comes down to it, if I would become pregnant within now or the next two years, I would simply not keep that child.”
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