this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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The real question: how do they make it past the dating stage?
They start out aligned, but then one person's ideology changes over time (perhaps even after marriage).
I was raised a combination of atheist (mom) and Quaker (dad) - the atheism definitely won, though I did internalize a decent amount of the Quakerism... I was engaged to a Catholic girl in my mid-20s. We discussed things early on, I said I'd respect her beliefs if she'd respect my lack thereof, and for a while it worked out nicely, we'd talk about spiritual stuff, but neither of us was trying to convert the other, it was more of a "how do you feel about x" or "how do you explain y"... But after a while, she decided that since I was "preventing" her from going to church some Sundays (I wasn't, I was fine with her going without me, she just didn't want to if she had the option to stay in bed and fool around with me, and why on earth would I turn her down?) that she wanted me to go with her the next Sunday whenever she skipped one. In retrospect, this was the first nail in the coffin of our relationship, but of course I didn't recognize it at the time. It took us moving in together permanently for me to see how controlling she was, and how mean she could be if she didn't get her way...
She was a church-going catholic, wanted you to go too, but was living together before marriage (mortal sin), fooling around (mortal sin) and engaged to an atheist (not a sin in itself but frowned upon)? I mean yeah, just the sheer contradiction of these is a red flag, no wonder the girl ended up being messed up later on
Sometimes you don't know. Or think it's not important.
There's this thing basically (you've probably heard about it), "I don't like X people, but you're good because you're not like them". X can be race, gender, any other things. When you are with that kinda person as long as they like you, you won't feel how they are, they'll treat you nice but it's an exception not the rule. But when they don't like you, they revert back to treating you like the X group. They'll even go "I knew X would be like this" and all.
Now in many cases if they were vocal about it from the beginning you'd notice and might get away. But in many cases they won't be vocal, or they'll talk about it with some extreme examples which you might feel is justified and you know you're not like that so it's fine. And in those cases you yourself might hate those subgroup for ruining your reputation so you might even bond over that.
Most people don't care that much and they are not that passionate about politics.
For some people politics ideologies is not the central point of their lives. Thus it really doesn't become something that disallow dating.