I'm a Republican. My Husband Is a Democrat. We Work in Washington — and We're Still Married
Many people find election season stressful, and I admit to being one of those nervous nerds who spends too much time watching political news and worrying about every change in my candidate’s fortunes. For me, the most stressful election of them all was in 2004. At the time, I was working in the White House for President George W. Bush, who was running for reelection. If he lost, I would automatically be out of a job, so my interest wasn’t just for the sake of the body politic — it was also personal.
A few weeks before the election, my boyfriend and I took a weekend getaway to Montauk. I jumped at the chance to ignore the latest news and battleground state polls while I breathed in the salty ocean air for a few days. My boyfriend welcomed the break, too. He was just as anxious, desperately hoping that his preferred candidate, John Kerry, would emerge victorious a few weeks later.
Yes, you read that right. I was working for the incumbent president whose name was on the ballot and my boyfriend, a Democrat who worked on Capitol Hill, was rooting for the outcome where I would lose my job.
We all know how that election turned out — with four more years of President Bush. Fast forward in my own personal story, I’m now happily married to that boyfriend who was voting for me to lose the best job I ever had. If he and I could survive that election on opposite sides of the aisle, I can assure you that you can do the same this election year if you and your significant other are voting for different candidates.
If I had only one piece of advice for how to navigate election season in a politically-mixed relationship, I would implore you to remind yourself every day that your primary personal relationships matter more than politics. Yes, it matters very much who runs the government. Elections do have consequences. But in your day-to-day life, the quality of your personal relationships will have an even greater impact upon whether you feel loved and supported and able to thrive. Your preferred presidential candidate is not going to be there late at night to talk through your hopes and dreams, to binge watch Killing Eve, to sit with you in a hospital waiting room, or to pick up a pint of Ben & Jerry’s at the end of a bad day. Remind yourself of this the next time you feel the white hot heat of political disagreement coursing through your veins. Take a moment to breathe. This is a person you love and value. Politics is very important, but it isn’t everything.
Being in a relationship with someone on the other side of the aisle gives you a unique opportunity to help make our politics less acrimonious. Many political pundits on cable news and Twitter paint the worst possible portraits of their political opponents – assuming evil motives and a black heart. But if you love a person on the other side of the aisle and you know they’re not heartless. (And if you do realize they’re heartless, well, now might be a good time to walk on out of there …).
What I discovered back in 2004 was that my boyfriend loved our country as deeply as I did. We simply differed in our preferred approaches to how the country should be led. And when you set aside the binary decision of Candidate A versus Candidate B, with all the adjectives ascribed to each, and start talking about problems and solutions, you will likely find that there are areas where you agree and solutions you can both live with. This is how you arrive at consensus — at the micro level in a relationship and at the macro level in a country. If more people approached politics this way, our current toxic environment would largely evaporate.
Drilling down to the more practical level, there are a handful of tactics I employed that might help you, too:
Role play.
No, not that kind of role play. If a conversation about the election gets heated, pretend you’re a reporter conducting an interview. Suddenly your job is no longer to convince the other person that you’re right, it’s to dispassionately ask questions to get information and insights from your partner. This can help you get through a conversation without saying something you’ll regret later. You may even learn something in the process.
Curate your social media.
You could make the case that life is better without Facebook or Twitter. But if quitting social media is a bridge too far for you, at least be mindful about whom you follow. Accounts that provide reliable facts and analysis can be a value-add. Accounts that traffic in exaggerated generalizations, set up false equivalencies, and ascribe motives are just going to make you feel stressed and angry. I know it feels good to see someone dunk on a public figure you loathe, but if your social media feed is a steady diet of that, it’s an indulgence that will harm your emotions without any tradeoff in educating you.
I’m not saying you should never be angry about politics — but be angry based on facts, not from a steady stream of manipulative tweets. It’s the difference between constructive anger and indulgent anger. Constructive anger can propel you forward. Indulgent anger is more likely to harm your mental health and your personal relationships.
Put it on the shelf.
Politics should never be everything to you. I live in the Washington, DC area, where that is the case for many people — and it’s probably my least favorite thing about living here. One of the secrets to the early relationship success with my now-husband was that at the end of the day we couldn’t meet up and talk mostly about work like practically every other couple in DC, because we were working in direct opposition to each other. This required us to talk about and do other things, which made our relationship a richer one in the process. Politics is not supposed to be the point of life. It’s a means to an end of creating a world where pleasure, art, sports, creation, discovery and relationships can thrive.
I can’t promise a completely conflict-free election season for you. There will be bumps in the road, but the lessons I’ve learned can help you get to November 4th with your relationship intact. (And the loser serves the winner breakfast in bed!)
More on Navigating the 2020 Election as a Family
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