Serious relationships are full of practical concerns. I’ve known loving couples who were unable to tie the knot despite their affection for each other, because of disagreements about whether to have children or about religious conversion, or because of divergent professional aspirations. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you might like them to, and it’s no one’s fault.

There are also many loving couples who get married despite significant differences. The Washington Post editorial board is concerned that this isn’t happening enough. One reason they are concerned is that there is a growing political gender divide, particularly among young Americans, with young men becoming more conservative and young women shifting left.

Fearing a “collapse of American marriage,” the Post recently editorialized that a “cultural shift might be necessary—one that views politics as a part of people’s identity but far from the most important part. Americans’ ability to live together, quite literally, might depend on it.”

I’m sympathetic to the idea that people should try their best to accommodate someone for whom they have strong feelings, if that’s what they want to do. It is hard enough to find love without writing off people over substantive but reconcilable disagreements. I think the Post editorial board errs however, in assuming that the issue is that politics is “becoming more central to people’s identity.” The issue is that politics is now far more pertinent to the kind of practical relationship concerns that determine whether a relationship is viable, even for couples who love each other deeply. Unlike differences of opinion on tax rates or land use, these disagreements can’t be reduced to mere partisan intolerance, because they shape the answers to basic questions about how a relationship or a household works.

Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox: Now political polarization comes for marriage prospects

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling overturning the constitutional right to an abortion means that opinions about abortion are particularly salient, and many people’s beliefs regarding abortion are related to opinions regarding women’s political rights and participation in the workforce.

Examining polling from the public-opinion research firm PerryUndem, the writer Jill Filopovic noted that opposition to abortion rights tends to correlate with a wide array of sexist beliefs, including that women should be at home raising children, that husbands have the right to rape their wife, and that men are better suited to public life than women are. “While men were generally more sexist than women, and across every racial and ideological demographic men held more regressive and hostile views on sex and gender than women,” she wrote, “the partisan gap was much larger than the gender gap across the board, including on questions that get to a respondent’s underlying disrespect of or anger toward women.”

The Dobbs ruling has already led to a nascent surveillance state designed to enforce laws against abortion. Being in a relationship with someone who thinks a woman should not be able to decide whether to end a pregnancy is, for women in some states, a newly risky proposition. Social conservatives have also set their sights on outlawing no-fault divorce, which would make ending marriages even more difficult, and potentially trap people in abusive and dangerous relationships.

It is not irrational for women with socially liberal values to avoid dating people who think that they should be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, that they should forgo their career once a child is born, that women’s suffrage was a bad idea, or that they should not be allowed to get divorced if the relationship does not work out. These are not trivial concerns, or simply partisan disagreements. They are central to fundamental questions in marriage, such as where to live, whether to have children, how to divide responsibility within a home, and whose career is prioritized when. Women may reasonably choose not to date men whose ideal society does not grant them the same rights as their would-be spouse.

Obviously, conservatives are also entitled to reject partners who don’t share their values. But although a conservative woman dating a liberal man may disagree with him about whether abortion should be legal, his views are unlikely to align with a legal, state-enforced compulsion to adopt them or conduct her life according to those preferences. No laws in blue states compel women to have abortions, to work instead of staying home, to eschew regular attendance at religious institutions, or to divorce if a partner fails to keep up with household duties.

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte observes, the marriage-polarization discourse is really about liberal women refusing to date conservative men. The fact that this is the real focus of people’s concerns is even stranger when you consider the amount of conservative-media content devoted to arguing that women with liberal views are ugly, unfeminine and undesirable.

A discrete but related issue is the rise of what the Post calls “manfluencers,” who “promote outright misogyny.” To get more specific, these figures have grown popular by espousing a worldview in which woman are subservient and sexual assault and domestic violence are socially acceptable. It is—to put it mildly—unreasonable to expect women to bear the social responsibility of bringing men who have succumbed to this ideology back from the brink by dating them.

Being single can already be a frightening experience, especially if you are young; anger and resentment can dull the pain of insecurity as well as heartbreak. Such figures typically offer the worst kind of dating advice for men in these circumstances—telling them that to make themselves more desirable and to win respect, they should be as domineering and cruel as possible. When disrespecting potential partners leads to further rejection, this no doubt exacerbates their loneliness and sense of persecution.

Some economic factors behind the rise of the new misogynist influencers cannot be addressed just by hectoring people into being more open-minded. Changes in the American economy and workforce have expanded opportunities for women, altering men’s role in society, though both men and women still expect men to be breadwinners. Further, arguments that some traditionally masculine values are toxic have left some men adrift, with an unclear conception of what a good man is supposed to be. If they don’t possess a strong sense of self, that absence of clarity leaves them open to the reactionary, semi-traditionalist nostalgia of professional misogynists.

The Post notes that a “growing number of young women are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners,” and that “as a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives.” The fact that more and more women are college-educated and men less so has also contributed to the political gender divide. As my colleague Derek Thompson wrote in 2021, “Men—especially in poor areas where college attainment is low and may even be falling—have struggled to adapt to a 21st-century economy, where a high-school diploma alone is often insufficient to earn a middle-class wage.”

From the July/August 2010 issue: The end of men

But elite spaces have their own tensions. This increase in the number of college-educated women has meant that they are competing with men for positions of influence and prestige, and using their labor power to shift workplace cultures in new directions consistent with their interests. These social and economic pressures make nostalgia for the bygone era of stricter gender hierarchies appealing to some men, whether white- or blue-collar, who may pine for a time when their prerogatives were unchallenged.

The leftward drift of single women has coincided with a conservative effort to demonize them—“single woke females” in one hilarious coinage—because they tend to vote for Democrats. As with Black voters or Latino voters, anytime a particular constituency becomes important to the Democratic Party, the conservative movement comes up with convenient explanations for why this group of people is responsible for all of the country’s problems. But as with those constituencies, the reason for this leftward shift is conservative policy—they are turning away from the party that wants to take their fundamental freedoms away from them. Calling single women “woke” for doing so is simply an attempt to pathologize a rational choice.

I don’t have a simple solution for the underlying economic challenges afflicting men—although clearly a successful revival of private-sector unionization would help. But as long as the only solution conservatives offer is a society that deprives women of certain basic rights or autonomy, those who adhere to such beliefs can expect many potential partners to look elsewhere. That isn’t a matter of political intolerance; it’s a question of freedom.