Politics of Dating: How do you find the Right, or the right Left, person?

And how Zohran Mamdani gave Hinge a push.

Jul 30, 2025

Substack ranks Politics Happens at #2 “Rising in World Politics”. Why not join the club?

Politics Happens provides independent comment on public affairs, funded only by readers. There is no institutional or partisan sponsor. The author answers to no one but his readers. Please consider donating through a paid subscription.

America’s social-democratic rising star Zohran Mamdani (33) has given online dating a boost among supporters who were suffering from swipe-fatigue, according to The Guardian. While campaigning to be the Democrats’ candidate for mayor of New York City, he revealed he’d met his wife on Hinge – and that did Hinge a favour too.

“Met online” has lost the stigma that once attached to it, as Mamdani has demonstrated, although it still sounds less romantic than “met at high school”. According to a 2023 US survey commissioned by eharmony, 71 percent of Millennials and 58 percent of Gen Z reported having used a dating app at some point.

The “love scientists” at Hinge ask users to classify themselves as either “liberal” or “conservative” or neither, a data point that goes into their “acclaimed Nobel-Prize-winning algorithm”. (I didn’t know that an algorithm was eligible for that prize!) But the liberal/conservative terms don’t work for everyone (say, if you’re a communist or a libertarian), and the distinction has connotations in the US that may not resonate elsewhere.

The Guardian quotes sociologist Dr Jess Carbino saying “politics is the new religion”, as a critical factor in the perceived suitability of prospective partners. That’s mainly referring, of course, to Americans, among whom politics in the Trump era is fiercely divided. Problem is that young American men are trending more towards Trump than young women are. According to a NBC poll, Gen Z Americans are more divided by gender than older age-groups over a range of political and cultural issues:

“Among all adults, 45% say they approve of Trump’s job performance and 55% disapprove. Adults between the ages of 18 and 29 grade the president worse than that: 34% approve, 66% disapprove. But the difference between young men and women is significant. While 45% of young men approve of Trump’s job performance, only 24% of young women do — a 21-point difference.”

Statistically, that would seem to make it harder for straight young people to match compatibly if political differences are increasingly a deal-breaker, to which we may add women’s rising educational attainments and economic independence compared with young men.

But are opposing political views really that big a deal-breaker? Amor vincit omnia, according to Virgil. So does love vanquish politics?

For a start, racial inequalities are reflected in the dating market. Dating sites collect information about ethnic or racial identities and preferences, and these have been analysed especially in the United States. American couples who met online are more likely to be inter-racial than those who met through other means, but those are still a minority of matches overall. When people look outside of that, there are hierarchies of preference, favouring whites. This intersects with religion. Similar patterns have been seen in Europe and in inter-racial marriage data in New Zealand. Humans are discerning, discriminatory, and not at all egalitarian in their preferences for a partner.

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier (to quote Bourdieu). Similarly, our ranking of attractiveness will (perhaps depressingly) say something about “where we sit” in the greater scheme of things.

But how much does politics matter? Thomas (2020) reports that almost half of the American couples they surveyed identified with different political parties, and that was about the same whether they’d met online or offline. Cross-party matches were more common that inter-racial matches. Assortative mating by political-party preferences may have risen, however, since those surveys were done in 2009 and 2017. People in the UK, according to one researcher, are “very unlikely to want to date someone” from an opposing political party.

This idea doesn’t match up, however, with a survey commissioned by eharmony of Americans aged 18-64 who were “open to online dating”. It concluded that “a majority of single Americans are still willing to give daters with different views a chance – as only 23% of US respondents said different political views could lead to them turning down a date.” As for whether similar political views are highly attractive, “Only 13% of Gen Z said similar political views could persuade them to travel a greater distance for a date, whereas 14% of millennials said the same”. On the other hand, that survey found large majorities of singles saying that their financial goals and career trajectories were more important to them than finding a relationship.

Money and ambition may count for more than politics, then, when it comes to dating decisions. Are we really such Materialists? (And I’ve only seen the trailer, so movie reviews are welcome in comments.)

Leave a comment

Much of the media on dating assumes it’s about the young, so I went in search of stats about middle-aged New Zealanders. According to Stats NZ, there were about 8,000 divorces granted in 2023, although the numbers have declined over the last two decades – following a decline in marriages. But non-marital relationships and break-ups aren’t counted in those statistics. The median age at divorce was 45.5 years for women and 48 years for men in 2023. Working back, this median couple were probably married in 2007 at the ages of about 30 and 32. So the marriage lasted less than 16 years, given that formalising divorce takes time. In all likelihood they have one or two children still in school and they’ve had to split up their assets – suggesting some painful, if not very bitter, differences. A new relationship may have preceded or caused the breakup, but our hypothetical divorcees are approaching 50 as they get serious about finding new long-term partners. Unless they’re lucky, the search will continue into their fifties.

Both of these “average” former partners still have earning potential, but most probably the woman will earn less and have about 20 percent less in retirement savings. As the Retirement Commission reveals, in financial terms, the woman will probably be worse off than her ex as she ages.

One thing that stands out in popular media articles on dating is the amount of advice, guidelines and even “rules”. These are often derived from rather dubious statistics. There are stats about the average number of relationships a person has had before finding a lifetime partner, ranging from 3 to 8, including (it was said) two heartbreaks. Such statistics quickly get converted into rules: if you haven’t had three or four relationships, then, for some reason, you’re not yet ready for The One. If you haven’t had your heart broken more than once, and dumped a few people yourself, then how will you know what you really need from a life partner? Or so some people say – as if being traumatised would help you to make better choices. But statistical averages don’t represent all individuals, and numbers don’t tell you what you ought to do. Even if – as one online survey commissioned by a lingerie brand reported – 3.7 relationships before marriage is about average nowadays, that doesn’t have to be your guide.

There’s a whole sub-genre on the subtle politics of “who pays the bill”. Then there’s “the three-month rule”: that’s how long they say it takes for romantic infatuation to burn out, at which point many relationships end, often unceremoniously. Relationship failure and heartbreak were seen as natural and inevitable consequences of dating in much of what I read. But meeting someone who’s genuine and compatible, and forming a relationship with her/him/them are two closely connected but different things. Much of the self-help advice mixes the two together, especially when dating follows fast upon a break-up.

It may be unwise to propose marriage to the first person you date – but, at the other extreme, you could carry on dating forever, enjoying the excitement of it, thinking there might be someone better just around the corner (after all, “you never know”), and deferring any actual attachment. Well, there’s a mathematical “optimal stopping” formula for the real nerds out there. First, estimate how frequently you’ll go on dates, and then estimate the maximum timeframe within which you plan to find your partner. Let’s say it’s a leisurely pace of one date per month over 20 months, or 20 dates max. To optimise your chances, treat the first 37 percent as once-only dates, for “data-gathering”, with no looking back. To make that a round number for our example, this means you date 7 people, take notes on each, and move on. You then go steady with the next person you meet whom you rate as better than any of the first seven, even if it’s number eight. That is, you stop looking right there, rather than go on hoping that there might someone even better if you just keep looking. There’s a risk, of course, that the best partner was one of those seven you passed over – and you can’t now call them back. And, once you stop, you won’t know if there really was someone better just around the corner. Well, this is about probability, not certainty, and life is full of regrets and unknowns. But what if the best potential partner whom you selected after those first seven dates rejects you, and the remaining dates don’t meet the standard you set? Your chances of finding a partner could have been improved if you’d planned to settle for a second or third best. Even mathematics has failed to solve the problem!

Getting back to politics, then, ideology and party preference may affect people’s choices of dates and steady partners – but by how much? There are plenty of anecdotes about successful marriages in which the partners hold opposing political opinions, and just as many about marriages breaking up over arguments about Mr Trump. But politics may not be a prominent factor in how most people choose a romantic partner.

Statistics are only descriptive: they don’t tell us what we ought to do. All the same, people invent “rules”, even though no one has a formula for finding a compatible partner. If someone discovered such a formula, it would make them very wealthy, if only they could bottle it. But, going by the Netflix series The One, with its DNA-matching concept, solving the problem could cause us a whole lot of trouble!

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?